Events

Golding Investor Days 2023

WHYBRATIONS – The World is Changing

The Golding Investor Days 2023 were an opportunity for high-calibre guests to discuss how investors should best position themselves at a time of permanent uncertainty and transformative change.

Golding Capital Partners invited them to Munich in mid-June for its Investor Days, which this year were entitled, “WHYBRATION – The World is Changing”. Some 100 investors and business partners accepted the invitation to the Hotel Andaz am Schwabinger Tor or followed the conference online via a video stream.

Founder and Managing Partner Jeremy Golding welcomed all the guests in their own language – including Japanese and Slovenian – before explaining in German the motto for this year’s event: the neologism “whybration” combines open-ended questions and uncertainty with the willingness to try new things and set positive forces in motion. Golding as a company had already started its own change process, its founder said, and this entailed making sustainability the overarching goal and anchor point for its corporate culture. The slogan, “Make a difference” shows that this is not limited to achieving ESG requirements, but aims to have a genuine, more widespread impact and bring about positive changes in environmental and social areas.

Although the world was undergoing wrenching turmoil and the markets were faced with great uncertainty, the company was doing “very well” according to Jeremy Golding. Thanks to the trust of its investors the business raised a record amount of €2.1 billion in fresh capital, and now manages almost €14 billion in assets from 240 investors based in many countries. The team has grown rapidly over the past year and now counts 210 staff members.

Jeremy Golding explained the steps his company is taking to continue meeting the expectations of its investors going forward. They include an overhaul of the corporate structure, internal processes and the IT infrastructure. One visible sign of the change is the realignment and expansion of the management team – “the best management team we have ever had” in Golding’s words – in order to drive the transformation successfully and keep the company on its growth track.

Shifting power dynamics

Jeremy Golding then handed over to the keynote speaker for the first day of the conference, Prof. Dr. h.c. Wolfgang Ischinger. The former diplomat was German ambassador in Washington and London and secretary of state in the German Foreign Office. Ischinger is now the President of the Foundation Council of the Munich Security Conference Foundation, which he led for 14 years.

There are very few individuals as well-placed as Ischinger to judge the implications of the current geopolitical situation. He believes that Europe is particularly affected by the changes currently taking place in the balance of power. Here there two types of state, Ischinger said: small ones, and those that have not yet realised they are small. He puts Germany in the second group. To be taken seriously by the USA as a partner, he says a transatlantic commission should be created in which Europe speaks with a single voice.

Opportunities for alternative investments

Dr Matthias Reicherter examined the question of whether, from an investor perspective, the current situation still belonged to the crisis, or was already part of the transformation. The conclusion of his presentation was that private capital is vital for the pending transformation of the economy to tackle the challenges of deglobalisation, decarbonisation, digitisation and demographic change. This creates opportunities for investors and specialists for alternative investments like Golding.

The keynote speech on the second day of the conference dealt with the question, “Sustainability – must-have or nice-to-have?” Prof. Dr Christian Klein, Professor for Sustainable Finance at Kassel University, made it very clear in his presentation that sustainable finance is “here to stay”. What was required was not only sustainable financial products, however, but ones that had a direct impact and also generated returns.

Numerous panels and presentations on both conference days provided more interesting food for thought to inspire investors. They gave insights into different strategies, asset classes and market segments, always taking the current environment and the transformative processes currently taking place into account.

He had learnt a new word recently, said Jeremy Golding during the two-day event: permacrisis. Under these circumstances the important thing for businesses, and for every single person, was to work towards a clear goal: to make things better.

 

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Susanne Stolzenburg

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