On Thursday, Hans Joachim Reinke's Management Board team appeared in front of the camera in the usual good mood.

There are enough reasons: Union Investment, the fund provider of the cooperative financial group, was once again able to present a year full of record results.

Its operating profit rose to 1.2 billion euros as of December 2021.

Assets under management reached a new high of EUR 454 billion.

Net sales in private customer business more than doubled in 2021 compared to the previous year.

Private customers invested 19.7 billion euros at Union Investment last year.

Gregory Bruner

Editor in Business.

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The fund provider is also popular in the field of sustainable investments. The assets under management in securities funds designated as sustainable according to the EU Disclosure Regulation rose to EUR 88.1 billion in 2021.

In 2020 it was still 61.2 billion.

Net sales in this segment for so-called Article 8 funds, in which individual stocks are selected according to sustainability criteria, amounted to 10.2 billion euros.

A first fund aimed at sustainable effects in accordance with Article 9 of the Disclosure Ordinance has existed since November 2021. By the end of the year, EUR 53 million had accrued to it.

Including sustainable real estate funds, sustainable investments come to 125.6 billion euros.

The comrades are also proud of winning more and more younger new customers for fund savings plans.

Last year, a third of the 584,000 new investment fund savings plans in private customers were sold to under-27s.

62 percent of new customers rely on equity funds.

Alternative investments have also lost their terror among older people.

28 percent of new business was with customers between the ages of 51 and 67.

One might think that the shocks of earlier financial market crises are still in their bones.

However, as Jens Wilhelm, who is responsible for portfolio management on the Union Investment Management Board, explains, equities are still the better alternative, even when bond yields are rising.

Even if, as Wilhelm predicts, the yields on German government bonds with a term of ten years reach the 0.35 percent mark at the end of 2022, the real yield will still be in the deep red in view of the high inflation.

Breaches of trust are avoided

When asked, Reinke also gave the absence of another crisis of confidence as a reason for the newfound courage of the older investors.

After the markets collapsed in March 2020, they have staged an unprecedented recovery over the past two years.

This should have reawakened the interest of many people.

Business with institutional clients is looking just as good.

For the first time in one year, more than 20 billion euros were collected here.

This development is due to the increasingly complex requirements for investing institutional money.

Regulation, sustainability and reporting are some of the reasons why more institutional investors are turning to the fund company's tailor-made solutions.

Equities remain attractive in 2022

In the outlook for 2022, Jens Wilhelm sees commodities as a high-yield asset class in addition to equities.

On the one hand, higher prices are due to a lack of investment in the exploration of new raw material deposits with increasing demand.

On the other hand, an economy that focuses on sustainability makes different demands and, for example, increasingly demands copper and nickel.

Board member Alexander Schindler, who is leaving Union Investment at the end of March, attended a fund house press conference for the last time.

Sonja Albers and André Hegemann will take his place.

Albers will run as Union Investment's candidate for the presidency of the BVI fund association, which Schindler currently holds.