 Stéphane Van Tilborg |
La Financière de l’Echiquier continues to carry weight in Belgium, with new initiatives planned for the coming months. Since 2018, Stéphane Van Tilborg has been Sales Manager for Belgium for La Financière de l’Echiquier. As such, he has successfully driven the development of the French manager’s activities in Belgium, and the commercial repositioning of the range towards thematic funds.
A long career
For many years, Stéphane Van Tilborg made a name for himself on basketball courts throughout Belgium. Born to basketball playing parents (at national team level), his height quickly helped him to join the Belgian national basketball team (in the age categories), and to play for more than twenty years in various division 1 and 2 clubs in Belgium, including in Vilvoorde, Mariembourg, Brussels, Charleroi and Ghent. “From this experience, I have maintained the conviction that it is always better to put the team before the individual in order to be able to win in the long term”.
Alongside his sporting career, he completed his studies at ULB and joined several consulting firms (including Deloitte and PwC) before launching his own business, specialising in advising public authorities. However, in 2010, his career changed direction and he became an insurance broker on the Belgian market, then worked for a Luxembourg company. He next joined the Carmignac Group sales team for Belgium, a formative experience that prepared him for joining La Financière de l’Echiquier in 2018.
Range expansion
“We immediately hit it off. They gave me the keys to the Benelux with carte blanche to hire the team I wanted. I was able to bring Frédéric Jacob on board, with whom I worked at Carmignac. “I had also arrived at a pivotal moment for the group. While La Financière de l’Echiquier was best known for its balanced flexible fund (Echiquier ARTY), the market was moving towards products with greater exposure to equities.”
“La Financière de l’Echiquier was in the process of shifting towards equity and thematic funds when I arrived”, with funds such as Echiquier Artificial Intelligence, Echiquier Climate Impact Europe, Echiquier Robotics and Echiquier World Equity Growth. “This greatly facilitated my task, and the major portion of our exposure in the Belgian market is now in a European small and mid-cap fund, illustrative of our stock-picking”.
This thematic range has been further expanded in recent months with the launch of Echiquier Space, a unique product in Belgium that focuses on the entire space ecosystem. “We waited three years before launching this fund, which was necessary to intervene in such a sufficiently large investment universe”. This fund can invest both in companies that launch satellites and in sectors that are major customers of the space industry such as geo-location services or companies that develop satellite internet products. The fund has raised €50 million in assets under management since its launch.
Sustainability
The other major development in recent years has been the rise of sustainable investments. “It has now become impossible to sell a fund to Belgian institutional investors if you do not have the Febelfin label, or if your products do not comply with the requirements of Article 8 of the SFDR Regulation,” notes Stéphane Van Tilborg. The EU SFDR legislation (Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation) was introduced at the end of March 2021, and aims to prevent fund promoters from continuing to present a product as being sustainable, even though it invests in companies that do not exhibit virtuous practices. In practice, funds are classified into three categories (Article 6 for non-sustainable funds, Article 8 for funds with a sustainability commitment, Article 9 for funds with a positive impact) based on criteria that are expected to change over the next few years.
“The label requirements can change significantly from country to country, resulting in significant costs or a sharp reduction in the investment universe. A European label might encourage wider recognition, but there are no such plans as yet. In addition, today, not all 8 funds meet the same requirements and constraints in terms of the ESG approach, which creates great disparity and negates the main goal sought by this European regulation. Under Article 6 (the least stringent), there are essentially only products that are indefensible from a sustainability perspective.”
Open architecture
Stéphane Van Tilborg emphasises that after a 2021 financial year disrupted by the difficulty in meeting his customers, the year that has just begun will be marked by an intensification of efforts towards wealthy investors.
“With Echiquier Club Benelux, we now offer our customers an open architecture management offering, so that we can offer them the best funds available on the market, both for categories in which we have a product and for those in which we do not have any funds in our range.”
This open architecture offering is particularly aimed at insurance companies and customers looking for the best fund to integrate into their portfolio allocation.
