Client story: Natixis Investment Managers

The context:

Ranked as one of the world's largest asset managers, Natixis Investment Managers offers institutional and retail clients a diverse range of innovative solutions across a wide variety of asset classes and strategies. Its multi-affiliate model caters to both public and private markets and is underpinned by a strong commitment to sustainable finance. Natixis IM is headquartered in Paris and currently manages $1.3tn in AUM.

We spoke with Philippe Faget, Head of Private Assets within Natixis IM Solutions, who outlined the firm’s interest in private markets. “At Natixis IM Solutions, we work on portfolio construction, portfolio management, asset selection, and asset allocation to create dedicated funds and mandates tailored to our clients’ needs. We leverage the wide-ranging expertise of our investment managers to build the best possible private assets solution for our clients,” he said. Philippe’s team designs, develops, and manages multi-asset portfolios, both liquid and illiquid.

He continued, “We have an asset allocator approach – we’re always analyzing macroeconomic trends to determine what will be the best-performing asset class of tomorrow.”

The challenge:

For Natixis IM Solutions, its primary challenge is finding access to high-quality, wide-ranging data on alternative assets. As Philippe explained, “When it comes to private assets, data collection, data coverage, and data research are all less developed compared to public markets”.

Philippe described Preqin’s ability to provide his firm with aggregated data and performance benchmarks as being key to navigating these challenges. “Access to Preqin’s aggregated data and benchmarks enables us to understand the behavior and performance of the different asset classes, which is crucial for beginning the asset allocation process.”

Natixis IM also has a bold market strategy defined by three long-term objectives: the democratization of private assets, portfolio diversification, and sustainable investing. When speaking about the first objective, Philippe said “Preqin’s innovative products provide the industry with more transparency. We want to give investors access to assets that were previously inaccessible – and Preqin’s data helps us a lot with realizing this ambition.”

As for diversifying portfolios and making investments more sustainable, Philippe commented that private assets were “very powerful” in achieving these aims.

The solution:

Preqin Benchmarks enable Natixis IM Solutions to identify opportunities, enter new markets, and offer new products to its clients.

Preqin Pro supports Natixis IM Solutions with up-to-date information across private assets, helping the firm to create the most comprehensive solutions for its clients.

Preqin Insights+ provides Natixis IM Solutions with actionable insights on a wide variety of asset classes and regions, helping its teams to monitor the market for updates and trends.

The result:

Through its extensive investment manager network, Natixis Investment Managers covers a wide variety of private asset classes. To target such a broad range effectively, the firm combines the internal information from its specialist teams with Preqin’s industry-leading data – giving it a complete picture of the market.

Preqin Benchmarks plays a key role in this process, enabling Natixis IM to create peer groups for easy performance analysis and comparison.

“Your customizable benchmarks are very useful to us because our asset allocation process is so granular in terms of geography and sub-strategies,” Philippe continued. “For example, they enable us to search for a list of private debt funds in Europe that only specialize in senior debt, with a vintage of three or four. This type of screening tool really helps in the creation of fund selection shortlists and benchmarking.”

Preqin Benchmarks helps Natixis IM with both its day-to-day workflows and its pursuit of long-term targets through the development of bold initiatives and products. Last year, Natixis IM was awarded the second prize at the 2023 Coupoles de la Distribution for its new Avenir Actions Long Term fund. The award recognizes innovation in the category of asset managers, and Natixis IM’s win showcases its commitment to making private markets a more accessible space for investors.

Natixis IM complements the performance data they get from Preqin Benchmarks with the industry-leading research of Insights+. Philippe pointed to our annual and quarterly reports on different asset classes, our specific reports on secondary markets, our thought leadership papers, and our reports on specific regions as being especially useful to his team.

“The focused approach of your reports on specific territories is very valuable to us, as it brings us information on regions not well-covered by other providers. With your reports, we can monitor the market through the lens of GPs we are not working with, giving us the broadest view possible.”

Why Natixis Investment Managers chose Preqin

• Natixis IM chose Preqin after its financial engineering teams conducted an analysis of our data, coverage, and methodologies. “You are a leader in the market, and this is very important to us,” explained Philippe. “Your platform is very user-friendly, and the data is updated very quickly through your reports.”

• When asked to identify what Natixis IM valued most about Preqin, Philippe answered, “The most important things for us are your coverage, your accuracy, your innovation (particularly on benchmarks), and the quality of your assistance.”

• Philippe described Preqin as a core part of Natixis IM Solutions’ everyday workflows, citing our annual reports, thought leadership papers, customized benchmarks, fund terms data, and quarterly indices as being the products his team uses the most.

• Natixis IM and Preqin are aligned in their commitment to an innovative, forward-looking approach to alternatives. As Philippe said, “Preqin plays an important role in educating the industry and has led the way on making performance data more available. At the moment, we are seeing a big trend towards evergreen funds and the secondary market. By their nature, they have very different performance indicators, so the fact that Preqin can provide analysis on this is very helpful.”

• Philippe also mentioned how much Natixis IM values our daily newsletter. “Before, we used to have to log into your platform and actively seek out specific reports. Now that we’re subscribed to your newsletter, we get alerted about new reports.”

About Natixis Investment Managers

Natixis Investment Managers is a global asset management firm owned by the French banking group Groupe BPCE. With an AUM of $1.3 trillion, of which $100 billion are illiquid assets, Natixis IM is ranked as one of the largest asset managers in the world. Originally, the company served as the asset management branch of the Banque Populaire group, Ixis, which was founded in 1984, which was then merged with the asset management arm of Caisse d’Epargne. With headquarters in Paris and Boston, Natixis Investment Managers is the second-biggest French asset manager by market share.

About Natixis Investment Managers Solutions

Natixis IM Solutions is the investment solutions and multi-strategy arm of the Natixis IM Group, and it leverages the allocation expertise of internal specialists and independent investment affiliates, working in the sole interest of investors.