STANBIC IBTC UNVEILS EQUITY INVESTMENT PRODUCTS
With the Nigerian capital market making a steady recovery, Stanbic IBTC Stockbrokers and its parent company, Standard Bank, have unveiled a new investment window that will help the market regain the confidence of investors and leverage new unfolding investment opportunities in the marketplace.
The new options were highlighted at a workshop in Lagos last Wednesday to announce introduction of the Standard Bank Africa Equity Access Products into Nigeria, and the benefits of utilizing Bloomberg as a real time information provider. The forum, which attracted both regulators and operators of the capital market, had more than 50 selected local institutional investors in attendance.
In his opening remarks, Chief Executive Officer of Stanbic IBTC Bank Plc., Mr. Chris Newson, stated that the institution has a duty to help deepen the Nigerian and African capital markets by consistently making public initiatives and strategies that could help all stakeholders, especially investors, to be better informed about developments in both the local and global economies.
As part of Africa's biggest banking group with focus on emerging markets, Mr. Newson said the emphasis of these sessions is such that they provide useful insights on how to diversify investment portfolios amongst different asset classes, and move away gradually from the narrow focus on plain vanilla equities and fixed income investments.
Access products are designed to provide the same economic value as an investment in the underlying equities, in an easy-to-trade package. The underlying investment can be an index, stock or a basket which are traded in USD or any other deliverable currency. Access products also help to avoid the complexities and associated costs of dealing in many emerging markets directly.
The target investors in Access products are institutional clients like the pension funds, asset management companies and the banks. Access products from Standard Bank, according to Mr. Engin Benli of Standard Bank London, offer investors exposure to all tradable African equity markets. The platform also allows investors to trade exchange traded African indices, invest in equity linked structured products and custom investment ideas.
Standard Bank's flagship access product is the global SB Africa Index, which provides exposure to the largest and most liquid stocks that benefit from African markets in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia. Stocks in the index are selected from the equities listed in major stock exchanges outside Africa, and from equities listed in the relevant stock exchanges in Africa. The index criteria relate to market capitalization, liquidity and a quantitative optimisation methodology which will be applied to determine the Index constituents and their respective weightings. The Standard Bank Africa index is published on Bloomberg under the ticker SBAFRICA.
The Standard Bank range in the Bloomberg portal showcases a product matrix of its capabilities spanning over 20 African local markets. Standard Bank has similar investable trackers in Nigeria, Botswana, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Tanzania, Tunisia, Zambia, Uganda and Morocco, among others.