Invesco is preparing for stronger demand from fixed income exchange-traded fund (ETFs) investors with the appointment of two portfolio managers.
The London office of the firm has appointed Wayne Parker, formerly of FinEx London, and Deepak Bharti, formerly of Deutsche Asset Management, to its fixed income team.
Invesco said the appointments were to help meet “strong investor demand” for fixed income ETFs, which occurs in part due to rising interest rates.
At FinEX, Parker was an ETF portfolio manager and trader, and at Deutsche AM Bharti was a senior equity ETF portfolio manager and helped Deutsche build its DB x-trackers ETF platform.
Both report to Raphael Stern, regional head of ETF portfolio management, who said there was “record demand” for fixed income ETF products.
Quoting ETFGI data, Invesco said ETFs listed in Europe saw overall net inflows of $4.60 billion in July 2018 – of which fixed income products gathered the largest at $2.74 billion.
The last few months have seen a number of innovations in ETF fixed income investing. In May, WisdomTree announced a convertible bond ETF investing in the tier 1 capital of banks, as did Invesco in June.
Invesco also launched three floating rate notes ETFs this year, while more recently BlackRock combined areas of demand in active bond investing when it launched four funds that target emerging market issuers and apply sustainable investing criteria.
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