UK fund manager Man Group’s quantitative investment arm Man AHL has secured a foreign investor licence in China.
The Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor (QFII) licence “will allow Man AHL’s investment strategies based outside of China to gain greater access to China’s domestic capital market”, Man Group says in a statement on September 30.
It comes five days after Beijing broadened the scope of investments under the scheme from stocks and bonds into alternatives such as private investment funds. The expansion also applies to another scheme called RMB Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor which enables managers to invest renminbi raised offshore in China’s onshore assets.
“We are excited to be one of the few systematic fund managers that have been granted a QFII licence so far, and to thereby gain wider access to China’s highly developed and liquid onshore market,” Antoine Forterre, co-chief executive officer of Man AHL, says in the statement.
Man Group itself holds a licence that allows global fund managers to raise capital in Chinese currency onshore for investments overseas, and a private fund manager licence that allows it to sell private funds to wealthy individuals in the country.
London-based Man AHL had US$36.4 billion of assets under management as of June 2020. Man Group had $108.3 billion of assets.
