Who are we?
The Company
Sesame Financial Group is a Geneva-based independent investment boutique and emerges as a leader in the tailored investment solutions and services industry.
We serve asset managers, family offices and institutional investors in Switzerland, and provide them with one of the most flexible and innovative open-architecture service platforms.
Most of the investment products we offer are based on proprietary cross-asset research. We select investment themes where our analysts detect high alpha potential caused by :
- Long-term trends: secular growth themes as population ageing, the water value chain, cyber-security, healthy living, emerging market consumption
- Tactical market events: overdiscounted assets, M&A potential, CDS/Cash arbitrage, ...
Our goal is to generate added-value for our clients, by optimizing market conditions and offering innovative investment themes, without any asset-class or geographical limitation.
Sesame's state-of-the-art open-architecture platform opens new horizons to investors who seek transparency, efficiency and full service all along the chain.
The Expertise
All our people have excelled in designing and issuing investment solutions in a trading, structuring, sales or research role at leading investment banks in Geneva, Zürich, London, Paris, New York and Brussels for the last decade before teaming up at Sesame.
Our keyword is independence.
Thanks to our thorough and comprehensive process, you will always have a broad range of issuers to choose from in order to pick the most attractive conditions for a given investment, while diversifying your issuer risk.
Sesame’s valued interlocutors are precious connections that are acquired through years of experience and networking in the investment banking industry. Those connections are one of the reason we are able to secure competitive conditions for our clients.
We preselect our issuing partners before each request, based on their strenghts relative to the targeted investment (funding, asset class, maturity, secondary market, …), and maintain high trade-to-request ratio with each one of them, in order to benefit from the best pricing conditions and service in the market.
What we offer
Cross-asset market research
Portfolio analysis & knowledge transfer
Product structuring & optimization
Tailor-made documentation (white labelling)
Tradable prices from various issuers
Full post-trade service (online automated reports, event-cycle monitoring)
Secondary market monitoring and double-valuation
Investment Solutions
A wide selection for designing what suits you best
Diversifying your credit risk exposure as well as the risk/reward profile of your investments
Maturities
Range
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From 1 Month to 10 Years
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Early redemption mechanisms
Issuers
Range
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20 issuers, from AAA to BBB-
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3 continents and 7 economic areas
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Global or specialized institutions
Strategies
Range
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Capital protection
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Participation
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Yield enhacement
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Leverage
Strategic Investments(Research Based)
Sesame Financial in-house research follows a top-down approach. We are convinced that secular growth investment themes deliver most alpha on the medium to long term. We apply a thorough quantitative and qualitative screening and pick a final selection of 10 to 30 stocks (depending on scope) with two objectives:
- offer you the purest exposure to the investment theme
- get the highest upside potential on a given investment horizon
Our selection is completely transparent and a comprehensive investment rationale is provided in our Research notes.
Tactical Investments
Designed to extract alpha in exceptional situations, from all asset classes. Those reactive investments are based on macro trends or technical factors (CDS/Cash basis, large inflow/outflow pressure in certain assets, …).
We also adapt our weekly offerings to live market conditions (implied market volatility, rates and funding curves, correlation, …) in order to let our clients pick optimized and well-timed investments.
Structured products
Our open-architecture platform offers you a cost-competitive, full-service, market access to design and launch tailor-made structured products with the help of our financial engineers.
Structured products allow investors to perfectly adjust the risk/reward profile of their investment. With our team’s extensive experience and know-how, paired to Sesame’s capabilities and volume, we are able to optimize structures and match your exact needs while avoiding the known drawbacks of some structured products (poor liquidity, lack of mark-to-market sensitivity, …).
Those products are by far the safest way to invest on your convictions: whatever the performance of the underlying is, you benefit from a partial to full Capital protection at the maturity of the product.
The drawback is that the investment horizon is usually longer (between 4 and 6 years if the investor wants to keep a full participation in the underlying performance).
Yield-Enhanced products are very attractive as they offer great flexibility: you can decide what is your priority between protection and return, adjust the periodicity of your coupons and add special features according to your market views.
We are able to optimize market conditions (implied volatility surface, dividend yield, asset correlation, interest rates, ...) to offer you the Yield/Protection combination that best suits your needs. We can structure Yield-Enhanced products for all maturities (from 1 Month to several years), all asset classes and all risk/return profiles.
Participation products are used to seize the upside of a specific investment theme. The most basic Participation product is the Tracker, offering 100% of the upside and 100% of the downside.
Nevertheless, investors usually chose to optimize the structure to fit their requirements: cap the performance in order to add protection, discount the dividends in order to buy at a lower price, leverage the participation on the upside while keeping the same risk on the downside, …
Those products are the most attractive and efficient way to invest on a strong conviction or to hedge your portfolio.
Leverage products are more transparent, more reactive and simpler to trade than options, but are also more risky than any other category when your global position is directional.
Our Added Value
Secure optimal conditions
At Sesame Financial Group, our strongest achievement is the emergence of a “win-win”environment for all the parties involved.
Thanks to Sesame’s volume and business flow, we have a strong pricing power with our issuing partners in order to secure the most attractive conditions.
We work with 20 issuing banks: we short-list them depending on your preferences (country, rating, …), then depending on their strengths with regards to the investment product specifications (funding curve, asset class, minimum investment size, etc.).
Our flexible platform, along with
our strong existing relationships,
allow us to offer you a unique
service made of pricing
aggressiveness, reactivity and
special attention to your needs.
Quantitive Know-How
At Sesame, we don’t think an all-quantitative approach is the best road to successful investments.
Nevertheless, the combination of a savvy qualitative homework and our powerful data analysis tools
helps optimize investment decisions in a fast, efficient way
Data compilation
Our database is fed by several leading market data providers (Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, ICE Intercontinental Exchange, …) as well as investment banks, allowing us to cross-check information for consensus (Estimates from Bloomberg, I/B/E/S, StarMine, ...) and deliver quality research content and pricing grids
Systematic data optimization
When designing an investment product on a specific investment theme, we will help you narrow a large stock universe through quantitative criteria. This allows you to short-list the underlyings that match the investment theme you picked and the conditions you need in terms of yield, protection,liquidity, …
Calculation and presentation
We can provide you with indicative probabilities on your investment (Barrier hit, Coupon payment, Early redemption, VaR, ...). Even if they are indicative by definition, as they depends on simulations and models, solving those implied probabilities before launching a new investment product, but also during its lifetime, can help an investor understand the product's pros and cons.
Pricing grid calculations
Our different tools allow us to solve all combinations of yield/protection/participation for a given underlying selection. Pricings can first be indicative (for unliquid underlyings or elaborate structures) or even tradable (for liquid underlyings and flow products).
Tailor-made Investment Documentation
No document can replace the investment product's Termsheet or Simplified Prospectus from its issuer. But along the product’s documentation, Sesame will be able to provide you with accurate and easy-to-access information that can assist you during your investment selection process. This information can take the form of automatically generated 2-pagers for flow products (autocalls, reverse convertibles, ...) or of detailed presentations including backtests and simulations.
