At Finland's Aktia Asset Management, net subscriptions over the second quarter remained negative, totaling EUR -98m over the second quarter. Market value change in the company's portfolios totaled EUR 578m for the second quarter and EUR 813m for the first half of 2021.

Assets under management increased from EUR 10.37bn at the end of the first quarter to EUR 15.58bn due to the acquisition of Taaleri's wealth management operations at the end of April for EUR 102m.

"Over the first quarter, fund assets grew mainly due to underlying market conditions, which contributed more than net sales," CEO Mikko Ayub says to AMWatch.

"On the one hand, our funds experienced strong inflows especially to allocated solutions funds and private banking mandates. Overall, equity funds pulled in the most notable inflow, and especially our Nordic equity funds," says Ayub.

Corporate bond funds and short duration funds, on the other hand, experienced the largest outflows.

"These were mainly allocation changes that our existing customers made," Ayub notes.

Integrating Taaleri's funds

Ayub notes the quarter was characterized by the completion of the acquisition of Taaleri's wealth management operations at the end of April.

Four of Taaleri's bond funds were merged with Aktia's own fixed income funds, and the company is now planning how to also merge certain equity and mixed funds.

"In the short term, we are going to announce what exactly will be done to these funds," Ayub says.

"Because the acquisition was only completed at the end of April, we could only kick off the reorganization in May. Before that, we were still officially considered competitors," Ayub adds.

Emerging markets fund beats benchmark big time

In February, a week before the company came out with the news it would acquire Taaleri's wealth management operation, two of its fund managers and three analysts resigned from Aktia Asset Management's emerging markets debt team.

The turbulence was a contributing factor in Aktia's net subscriptions dropping at EUR -304m in the first quarter.

Ayub looks back at the events of early 2021, and notes that in the end, the event had no impact on the performance Aktia's Emerging Markets Local Currency Frontier fund.

"We've beaten the fund's benchmark YTD very clearly, by 7.35 percentage point this year, which means the departure of some of the personnel did not have any impact on the performance of the fund," he says.

"The team was then rebuilt and I would say it is now stronger than before."

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