Heroics Capital Monaco set up in the Principality in January this year. This new, highly ambitious management company focuses on UHNWI entrepreneur clients. We spoke to Julien BAPTISTE, its CEO.
What is your background?
I started my career in Luxembourg, in an investment bank, on a derivatives desk. At the time, these were Corporate Investment Banking activities, the very heart of the trading rooms. I worked in Luxembourg for five years in this area before taking up an opportunity in Monaco in 2016, for personal reasons, bringing me closer to the south of France. I joined a major Monaco bank on a derivatives and structured products desk, which marked the start of my transition to private banking. My last position involved responsibility for a team of ten people in the dealing room, covering structured products, foreign exchange, precious metals and execution. We were also responsible for managing and advising a specific and dynamic client base within the investment advice department.
Within this division, we wanted to develop sophisticated services aimed at UHNWIs. During these years, the project to create an agile, ultra-connected asset management company began to take shape.
How did it come about?
Our main shareholder, a well-known entrepreneur in the media and property sectors, played a central role in the creation of Heroics Capital in Luxembourg. He initially worked with the founders of Heroics Capital to create the company together, drawing on his extensive network and expertise in business management. With complete confidence in the team, he was instrumental in raising funds and attracting other prestigious families and shareholders. Building on this success, Heroics Capital Monaco was then born as a subsidiary with the same strategic support.
Today, we have two entities: a Luxembourg company in the process of being transformed into a fully-fledged management company with AIFM and MiFID approvals, whose services will be passported in Europe and the Middle East, and a consultancy firm in Monaco, approved by the CCAF.
The operational management team is made up of Cyrille NAHABEDIAN, Alexandre TRAMINI, Jonathan NIDDAM and myself, the former global head of market activities for a major banking institution.
What was the aim?
Driven by the desire to offer unique solutions tailored to the specific needs of our clients, particularly entrepreneurs looking for dynamic performance, we created Heroics Capital Monaco with a strong entrepreneurial spirit.
My partners and I had a wealth of expertise and experience in capital markets activities. We wanted to get closer to our clients, particularly entrepreneurs, by offering them innovative solutions requiring cutting-edge expertise, integrating artificial intelligence and digitalisation to maximise their success.
Do entrepreneurs now make up the bulk of your customer base?
99 %. Our customers have quickly reached the limits of the services offered by a private bank, without having direct access to the big investment banks.
By observing how the big families were organising themselves, in particular through dedicated investment funds, an opportunity arose. As a result, a Luxembourg investment fund was created in January 2023 in the form of a SICAV housing a RAIF fund reserved for qualified investors. This fund has enabled our customers, particularly large European families, to move away from the trading architecture of private banks and access the financial markets as institutions.
What is your competitive advantage in this highly competitive market?
It's unique in several ways.
- First of all, we are technicians, with solid expertise in market finance. We identify opportunities for our customers, while developing strategies that we have mastered for over 20 years, often using derivatives.
- Secondly, we target a specific, agile and well-informed clientele, looking for innovative solutions that match their financial capabilities and a performance target of around 10% a year. More generally, we consider money market + 700 bps whatever the market conditions.
- We align our interests with those of our clients. Rather than being remunerated on a fixed fee basis, we have introduced a success fee system, where our remuneration is directly linked to the results we achieve. This gives us an incentive to provide the best advice, using all the engineering resources at our disposal, including highly advanced backtesting tools. This is a fundamental pillar of our DNA.
- Finally, the majority of Heroics Capital Monaco's budget is invested in research and development. We make a point of deploying digital tools for our clients. One outstanding example is the development of an in-house risk platform validated by the largest investment banks.
- We also offer an entirely digital platform for managing structured products, enabling operators and our customers to monitor their products dynamically and completely autonomously, whatever their complexity.
You mentioned a 3.0 approach to your asset management business...
What we call discretionary management or ‘3.0’ investment advice is based on the extensive use of advanced technologies, in particular artificial intelligence and algorithms to improve decision-making. We can draw on our holding company in Luxembourg, which has a team dedicated to quantitative research, called ‘Quant & Research’. This team uses financial engineering tools to detect arbitrage and identify market opportunities. We have invested heavily in research and development to ensure that we are always at the cutting edge of innovation. This technological positioning, coupled with our expertise in derivatives, enables us to meet the requirements of particularly dynamic clients, with extremely rigorous risk management. This is also a central aspect of our strategy.
Can it be said that the Monegasque financial centre meets the needs of your clients?
Monaco is a recognised centre for wealth management, and in my view it has nothing to envy other European financial centres. Its financial institutions are very dynamic and their regulations are constantly changing. In particular, they have to contend with changing investor expectations and major technological challenges, and their agility is fairly limited. We saw a real opportunity to set up our investment advisory business here, as there is a strong demand for different, tailor-made services.
In the Principality, Heroics Capital Monaco aims to bring a new business model to the investment advisory sector, one where managers and clients align their interests with the objective of growing their capital and the management company.
Heroics Capital Monaco is nothing less than a ‘Family and Friends’ investment platform where founders and clients grow together.
