This week, we had the wonderful opportunity to give back by mentoring the next generation of professionals.
Invited by François Koulischer at the University of Luxembourg, we shared our experiences and the valuable lessons we learned along the way.
Often, we hesitate to acknowledge our mistakes, yet it is precisely these experiences that enrich our knowledge. They are the costs we incur in pursuit of our goals—the very goals that fuel our dreams. Without clear objectives, dreams can remain just that—dreams that ultimately lead to disappointment.
The students in the Money, Credit, and Banking course were eager to understand how these lessons can address challenges related to wealth transition, impact measurement in investing, and building endowment-style portfolios.
We commend their curiosity and dynamism across all pathways. Ultimately, it is essential to recognize, admit, learn from, and then move on from our mistakes. While they can be costly, the students grasped that learning from others’ experiences can be even more valuable and far less painful.
The students have for already work experience and from institutional and private sector entities in the finance domain.
During our interactive work session, we covered essential topics such as:
- Institutional processes of wealth management and how they can be applied to private investment offices.
- Diversity in family offices purposes, operating processes and governance.
- Best practices for next generation involvement into the family business, or family office.
- Sustainable investing, focused on measuring impact.
- Foundations and endowments, and how the European market offers a variety of tools.
- Income approach and value-based investing, after having quantified the goals once we distinguished the needs.
- Strategic asset allocation, and the interplay with the capital market assumptions.
- Importance of an investment policy statement, and how one can interact with an outsourced CIO or delegate certain investment functions.
The students demonstrated remarkable enthusiasm, actively engaging with questions about investment theses, specific investment hurdles, scenario analysis, stress testing, benchmarking, and leverage. They also expressed interest in alternative strategies, including hedge funds.
Additionally, there was a lively discussion regarding career paths in wealth management, leading to requests for mentorship opportunities, which we are excited to support. The interaction was not only informative but also fostered a collaborative spirit between our team and the future leaders of the industry.