Benjamin Fussien (pictured), Head of ETFs & Funds, Euronext writes that it’s been another good year for Euronext and its ETF offering.
2016 has been a volatile year for equities, with two very significant political events leading to high volatility spikes with record volumes on specific days.
Regardless, Euronext’s five ETF markets demonstrated once again, their reliability and high level of security for investors and trading participants. There was a record number of new listings, with 124 in 2016. Euronext welcomed UBS ETF as new key ETF issuer and onboarded new significant liquidity providers.
Fussien comments: “Independently of the political events, volumes were down on the back of a very low volatility environment across the year. Despite these low volumes, we achieved very strong outcomes, notably thanks to an even further increased client centricity, in line with Euronext’s overall strategy `Agility for Growth’, introduced last year.
“2016 was a good time for us to intensify client centricity and further grow in importance within the ETF landscape in Europe. We gained enough credibility and a central positioning to be at the forefront of the development of this buoyant industry, as experienced by the amazing industry collaboration and partnership to launch a pan-European block trading MTF. This ETF MTF project will provide both innovation on NAV trading and improved RFQ features, amongst others.
“We intend to launch the first true pan-European one-stop-shop platform in Europe to fight against opacity and market fragmentation, which both represent the two major issues for an even faster growth of the ETF business in Europe.
“Industry’s commitment was second to none with all of the key ETF issuers, LPs, banks, CCPs, software vendors and even some buy side actively contributing to make the ETF market better.
“There is still a lot of work to do though but we’re making material and very positive progress and prospects are very promising.
A strong mix of talented people has been instrumental to Euronext’s success. These improvements and record in number of listings came on the back of an expanded team with new hires, introducing Maryne Lefeuvre and Roland Prevot. Lefeuvre is charged with building the UK business while Prevot brings his experience in investment banking and operations to the ETF team. The team is also complemented with Sohila Bouamama.
“The team shows a very high level of dedication, as well as strong cooperation across the firm with marketing, market surveillance, corporate actions or government affairs, amongst others.”
Brieuc Louchard is responsible for the business development coverage in the Netherlands and France. “The Netherlands business is very important for us and has been very strong over 2016 with some of the biggest market makers based in the Netherlands, Optiver, Flow Traders and IMC,” Louchard explains.
Looking ahead, Fussien confirms that the pipeline for 2017 is even stronger in terms of issuers, with new significant players expected to join during the course of the year, on top of successfully welcoming Source ETF in early February of this year and trading participants and liquidity providers.
Fussien says: “We are very proud and grateful to all clients who voted for us. It is very rewarding to receive this level of client recognition, as shown by this ETF Express award, which we have won for the second year in a row.”
“We’re really grateful to all these fantastic people and institutions for such commitment, in line with our own very strong commitment to properly deliver this key project, both at Group and ETF team level,” Fussien concludes.
