"Investing in Italy: how to activate the potential of our Country"

“Investing in Italy: how to activate the economic potential of our Country”

Publishing by Patrizia Celia - Head of Large Caps, Investment Vehicles & Market Intelligence - Primary Markets Borsa Italiana

The 2011/61/EU Directive of the European Parliament, known as the Alternative Investment Fund Managers Directive and transposed in Italy in 2015, subjects to a uniform regulation all Alternative Investment Fund Managers (AIFMs) that do not fall under the scope of the 2009/65/EC Directive.

In this way, listed or unlisted funds and investment vehicles are brought within the AIFMD perimeter, with characteristics that are sometimes very different from each other in terms of internal structure, investment strategy, reference markets and that historically were located outside the UCITS regime: Hedge Funds, Closed-End Private Equity and Venture Capital Funds, Closed-End Private Debt Funds, Real Estate Funds, Infrastructure Funds and other Specialized Investment Vehicles, Investment Companies and others.

Within the large family of AIFs, the closed-end AIFs are experiencing a moment of high dynamism, thanks to the chance of adopting a medium and long-term strategy in a wide and diversified range of instruments, thus fostering investments in non-traditional real economy asset classes with difficult direct access and promoting portfolio diversification and risk-return optimization.

The natural ability of closed-end AIFs to channel resources of domestic and international asset owners in the domestic real-economy can influence the growth of the economies in which we operate, and Italy in particular. Therefore, the debate is now shifting to how to expand the investor base. In this context, considerations on the listing of AIFs arise.

Indeed, the listing of AIFs produces several advantages: distribution efforts are gathered in the IPO, the number of professional investors (and non-professional in the case of AIFs opened to retail) increases, available resources are optimized and any early redemption mechanism of AIFs shares becomes more efficient.   From this perspective, Borsa Italiana has developed a new set up for the regulated Market for Investment Vehicles (MIV). The MIV is a market able to support fund-raising in the phase of vehicle constitution (through IPO) and in subsequent capital increases; moreover, the MIV allows an optimization of the technical times for the disposal of closed-end AIFs units (or shares) without damaging the valuation for all those investors who will continue to hold the shares in their portfolios.