La Française Inflection Point launches €50m global equities fund run by new hire

Inflection Point Capital Management (IPCM), the fund manager launched by Matthew Kiernan in 2009, has launched its first stand-alone investment fund since signing a partnership deal with La Française, the French investment group. The fund, with €50m in assets, will be housed within the joint-venture, La Française Inflection Point (LFIP), with stock-specific input from IPCM based on its Strategically Aware Investing (SAI) strategy and megatrends research. The investment manager for the fund is a new hire, Ariane Mahler, who has joined LFIP as Portfolio Manager, Global Equities. Mahler, who is now based between Paris and London, was formerly a Senior Global Analyst and Portfolio Manager at Tradewinds Global Investors in New York. There, she co-managed the $250m Nuveen Yield-Enhanced Global Value Fund. At LFIP, Mahler will work alongside Laurent Jacquier-Laforge, its Paris-based Chief Investment Officer.
The new fund, a 50-name, high-conviction global equities fund, is being seeded by money from Crédit Mutuel Nord Europe, the French co-operative banking group, which is the parent of La Française. It is the first global equities fund that La Française has launched.The fund will be benchmarked against the MSCI World index with latitude for comparison to the MSCI All Country World Index (ACWI). It aims for above-index performance of +300-500 basis points per annum. IPCM said a live incubation of the same fund, but based on 35 stocks, had returned 25.76%, outperforming the MSCI ACWI by 750 basis points. Matthew Kiernan, Founder and Chief Executive at IPCM, says LFIP is planning to launch two more funds shortly; a real estate portfolio and a climate change-based fund, where he says the firm is hearing significant client interest. At the end of 2013, La Française took a 49% stake in IPCM UK, now the main London-based subsidiary of the sustainability manager, while IPCM took a 49% cross stake in the newly created Paris-based entity LFIP. La Française transferred $1bn in assets to LFIP that were previously run via a joint venture with J.Safra Sarasin known as LFP Sarasin. LFIP is currently in the process of reconfiguring the investment strategy of the $1bn in assets based on the IPCM SAI strategy.