The CAIA Charter has provided me with clear tools to quickly understand where institutional investors, my clients, fit in the alternative investment landscape. Upon completing the CAIA Charter program, I can decipher the jargon and key drivers of the main alternative investment strategies, which is helpful considering the variety of situations and exciting challenges I am faced with in my daily job.
Upon transitioning towards my current role in alternative investments, I felt the need to gain a better understanding of how alternative investors think, what concerns they have and how I could find ways to address those and serve them better.
CAIA gave me just the right split between theoretical and practical knowledge which helped me become an accomplished structured credit professional.
My asset class, project and asset backed finance, has the specificity of being very uncorrelated to the global financial markets, while being at the forefront of our everyday lives: how we power the economy, travel, accommodate ourselves. It also has, due to this feature, a high potential for leverage unlike more normally distributed investment classes. This creates a broad diversity of tailor-made products and ways to invest.
My career has given me the opportunity to spend 10 years in Asia before returning to Europe. Both regions exhibit very dynamic features, the need to find a new optimized growth model in Asia and to cope with the challenges of mature economies in EMEA. Looking also at the Americas in my current role, I would put them somewhere in the middle of this global landscape. My years in Asia taught me both the difficulty and the excitement of starting things from scratch. Many deal structures come as a given in EMEA and the US, but the regulatory, business and economic environment specifics in APAC created a need to adapt and adjust.
Conversely in EMEA, the more mature market for structured products makes it difficult to innovate as many things have already been done. The competitive pressure is also higher as a result, which means that differentiation comes from speed of execution and reliability rather than innovation.
In the US, due to the prevalence of real money investors, our market is both more mature and less sophisticated as it has become very industrialized. It shows some of the trends the other two regions could well experience in the coming years.
In my role I need to think out of the box and be persistent in convincing and influencing both internal and external stakeholders. Adapting structured credit technology and tools to project finance is both a huge challenge and a massive business opportunity for banks that are increasingly pressured to churn their credit portfolios and optimize their balance sheets. This journey is a long one and does need persistence!
I therefore have huge admiration for all the successful entrepreneurs who believed in their ideas before everyone else did and made them happen in the end.
To a fresh starter in our industry, I would recommend learning as much as possible, keeping an open mind and exposing oneself to as diverse a set of situations as possible. Online trainings have improved hugely in quality and are now very affordable. I strongly encourage juniors to try these and acquire as many skills as possible, hard and soft. It will come in handy at a later stage.
To a mid-career professional, I would recommend growing skills outside of pure technique, as what took us to mid-level will not take us much higher up without soft skills, negotiation, influencing and interpersonal capabilities. For those who are looking to transition into a new industry or new region, structured products or other, I encourage them to leverage their transferable skills. Many jobs require similar skills, and a successful transition comes with something to bring to the table, in exchange for the opportunity.
About Matthieu Le Bret, CAIA, FRM
Matthieu is the Managing Director and Global Head, Structured Credit Distribution, Nord/ LB. He is globally responsible for making the assets originated by Nord/LB, a leader in structured finance and energy transition finance, accessible to non-bank investors.
His role consists in conceiving, marketing and executing investment solutions to help our institutional partners around the world co-invest with Nord/LB into a low-carbon future. He has been a CAIA Member since 2013.