Yesterday, the National Museum Zurich was not exclusively dedicated to Swiss culture and history, it also served as a platform for dialogue on themes topical for the Swiss financial center. SFI’s Managing Director Professor François Degeorge kicked off the conference by sharing his latest research results on secondary buyouts with the roughly 200 participants. Secondary buyouts, transactions in which a private equity firm sells a portfolio company to another private equity firm, have attracted increasing attention in Europe and today account for more than half of private equity exits. Do such transactions create or destroy value for investors? Based on his research, Prof. Degeorge answered this question and illustrated that transactions between private equity firms with complementary skill sets create value whereas those involving funds bought late in the cycle do not. His presentation and the subsequent panel discussion with Rolf Friedli, Managing Partner at Capvis Equity Partners AG, Jürgen Gerke, CEO at Allianz Capital Partners GmbH, and Markus Reich, Managing Partner at Cross Equity Partners AG generated great interest from the audience. The panel was moderated by Andreas Baumann, Partner and Head of Private Equity Integrated Investments at Partners Group.

The conference’s focus then turned to real estate prices and the question of whether they will continue to rise or whether a correction lies ahead. Swiss Finance Institute Professor Alberto Plazzi from the Università della Svizzera italiana shared with the audience his view from a research perspective. In the panel discussion that followed—chaired by Dr. Andreas Merbecks, Partner at Capco Switzerland—Zoltan Szelyes, Head of Global Market Research-Real Estate at Credit Suisse Asset Management (Schweiz) AG, stated that people’s behavior should be observed in order to identify a potential bubble at an early stage. Roger Hennig, Head of Real Estate at Schroder Investment Management (Switzerland) AG added that local expertise is a prerequisite for smart investment decisions in real estate, and Luciano Gabriel, Chairman at PSP Swiss Property, explained how mega-trends should be taken into account in such investment decisions.

The liabilities of funds was the topic of the third panel discussion. Swiss Finance Institute Professor Eric Jondeau from the University of Lausanne explained how an optimal investment strategy for a pension fund should look and then discussed current challenges and opportunities that pension funds are facing, with Alexandre Gaillard, CEO and founder of InvestGlass, Raphael Joos, Chief Risk Officer at the Pension Fund of Credit Suisse Group (Switzerland), Stephan Meschenmoser, Managing Director and Investment Strategist at BlackRock Asset Management Schweiz AG, and Jean-Luc Seidenberg, Head of Europe at UBS Asset Management. The panel was moderated and the keynote address that followed was introduced by Rudi Bogni, former CEO of UBS Private Bank.

Dr. Michael Loretan rounded off the conference with an outstanding keynote speech on the positioning of the Swiss Financial Market Supervisory Authority (FINMA) in the sphere of asset management. He illustrated FINMA’s tasks and challenges and answered the many questions posed by the audience—from opportunities for crisis prevention to FINMA’s positioning related to the emerging crypto-currency solutions.