NordSIP (Stockholm) – Last week, NordSIP met with C8 Technologies, an inspiring new company, who in their own words “are breaking new ground by turning things around”. Mattias Eriksson, Founder and CEO of C8 Technologies talked about his innovative investment management tool, how ESG lies at its core, and the interest his project has encountered around the world, particularly in the Nordics.
Imagine a product that creates a whole new infrastructure for managing institutional capital. C8 offers an innovative way to manage investments by providing direct access to active, tradable indices developed in-house by C8 or by leading investment managers. Rather than allocating to external funds, investors can run the equivalent strategy internally. Based on a chosen index the C8 Technologies system presents portfolios to the user, who initiates the trades. “For example, instead of giving a mandate to an external manager and receiving a report once a month based on a snapshot of the portfolio from the last day of the month, the asset owner would have total transparency and be in control of all decisions”, Eriksson explains. Institutions of different sorts or from different parts of the world can buy or sell from each other without mediators. “We make it possible for small institutions to have access to capital and for large institutions to have access to small funds”, Eriksson says.
The platform has been live for a year and a half and raised interest from institutions in places as diverse as China, the Middle East and the UK. Focus is now on the Nordics and a regional office will open in Stockholm shortly, for customer relations as well as systems development. “For the Nordic market the aim is to develop ESG-screened active Indices to serve the potential need from semi-large pension funds and others to buy specific risk premia at a much lower price than they can get through managed accounts.” By having full transparency and thereby control of all activities within the strategy, the institution can be certain that the chosen ESG criteria is indeed followed. “Hedge funds are built on secrecy and hiding. We want to be disruptive and create a paradigm shift”, says Mattias Eriksson. The greatest value added from an ESG perspective is the full transparency that the users of the system get, says Eriksson. C8 is working closely with ALDC Partnership’s Angelica Lips da Cruz to develop exciting new active indices in the ESG space.
Eriksson talks with excitement of the great interest that the system has met in China where local hedge funds add their ideas to the system where they are transformed into indices and for example Swedish funds can trade according to these ideas. “We are building a community between asset owners and the people who know what to do by creating new ways of trading and creating value.”
Photo C8 Technologies
