Swiss Life Asset Managers operates two hybrid funds that invest in private markets infrastructure equity: an ELTIF launched earlier this year and a semi-open-ended semi-liquid fund for Swiss pension funds only launched in 2000.
“Our basic idea was, as we can’t make the product more liquid than the sum of the single elements within the fund, we wanted to give liquidity windows to some investors with certain gates,” says Christoph Gisler, head of infrastructure equity at the Zurich-based firm. “This allows investors, from time to time, to provide liquidity to their liabilities.”
The first iteration of ELTIF, created in 2015, did not have the flexibility that Swiss Life Asset Managers felt was necessary, but the company revisited the idea of launching an ELTIF with the recent changes to fund requirements.
“When we saw that the ELTIF 2.0 regulation has all the ingredients required to meet the targets in a way that we felt comfortable with and that we could explain to investors, we decided to go into that market,” Gisler says.
At launch in January this year, Swiss Life Asset Managers became among the first three providers of an ELTIF 2.0 fund that received approval on the same date. The fund has currently attracted €23 million (with an additional €50m in pre-commitment) – though Gisler expects the fund to exceed €500m over time. He describes the fund as being semi-open ended with a gating system.
Swiss Life AM also expects investors – principally wealth managers and individuals – to invest in the ELTIF over the long-term, which Gisler defines as at least a 10 to 12 year investment horizon.
This interview was first appeared in a joint Funds Europe-Caceis research report on hybrid funds published earlier this year. Click here to view the report.
