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EY Funds Forum 2023

EY Funds Forum 2023

EY Funds Forum
On Tuesday 5th of November, our team attended the superb EY Funds Forum 2023, in the very Christmassy Shelbourne Hotel.

A full house listened as Minister for Finance Michael McGrath outlined that 17k are employed in the funds sector, and Ireland has the biggest share of ETFs in Europe. The legislature are working on the National Financial Literacy Strategy to create more trust and confidence to increase consumer participation in funds.

He is working very hard to get the new EU Anti-Money-laundering Authority (AMLA,) to locate in Dublin.

Brian Corr, Senior Corporate Specialist, Head of Funds Review 2030, Department of Finance went on to say that the Funds Industry is not good at promoting itself to the legislature, he coined the phrase ‘Shadow Banking’

The Irish public is predominantly savings driven and some of the barriers to investment, like reducing taxation and Financial literacy might help to break down those barriers.

EY’s Economist Loretta O’Sullivan, gave everyone in the room hope that the recent interest rate rises may come to an end in the summer of 2024. Ireland is in good shape economically with the government able to spend €14bn in extra domestic support and creating 2 new funds, FIF and ICNF as extra fiscal buffers. The three governmental targets going forward are Infrastructure, digitisation and decarbonisation.

Victoria Brown (MD at Abrdn), Alex Leonard (CEO at Blackstone Credit) and Karoline Keane (Head of Project Development at Mediolanum) all agreed that the way to keep talent in the funds industry was to innovate and be nimble to keep things exciting for personnel. They were chatting about streamlining their products to focus on what they are good at and that rationalisation and customisation can lead to hard decisions but that innovation was incremental and necessary to keep pace with the markets.

The star performer of the morning was our very own Johnny Sexton, in a fireside chat with Colin Ryan (Managing Partner at EY Financial Services Ireland). When asked how he as a leader and the Irish team had in general performed so well over the past number of years, he cited three things:

  1. Andy Farrell, the best coach he had ever known.
  2. Joe Schmidt instilled 3 traits in the team, Discipline, Hard Work and Humility. Understanding their own personality traits in relation to the other team members.
  3. Lead by example, do the simple things right, be on time, don’t take short cuts.

Representing The Panel at the event were Anne Keys and Darina Heavey.

#TogetherStronger

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