Citywire Southeast Asia Retreat 2026

Indexes and factors are default building blocks for portfolios, yet their labels can hide active design choices—often more “active” than investors expect—and may not lead to better outcomes. In this session, we go beyond the label to examine the good, the bad, and the ugly of indexing. We’ll cut through the “factor zoo” and return to first principles on what truly drives expected returns. We’ll then introduce the Avantis approach: preserving the benefits of indexing—diversification, transparency, and cost discipline—while applying deliberate, systematic active tilts designed to improve expected returns, grounded in academic research, aligned with common sense intuition, and validated empirically. Ultimately, the session highlights why a more intentional, systematic approach—like Avantis—can provide a better way to pursue improved outcomes without giving up the benefits of indexing.

Workshop Objectives:

Equip participants to spot where “passive” indexing and factor labels can fall short—and show how Avantis aims to offer a better way: keeping the core advantages of indexing while systematically targeting more intentional exposures designed to improve expected returns. 

As global markets undergo structural transformation, investors are navigating a macro landscape shaped by shifting geopolitical dynamics and widening dispersion across credit markets. The search for yield has become increasingly selective, with a focus on resilience and downside protection.
In this session, Barings will share its latest perspectives on the global high yield market, highlighting where compelling and evolving opportunities are emerging across credit markets. Backed by over four decades of experience, Barings’ global fixed income platform is well positioned to deliver differentiated solutions.
The discussion will dive into Global Senior Secured Bonds. With its first-lien and senior secured nature, this asset class has gained traction for its ability to deliver compelling income with enhanced capital protection across market cycles.

Workshop Objectives:

Learn more about the current high yield markets and explore why Global Senior Secured Bonds represent a differentiated and compelling solution for investors seeking resilient income with enhanced downside protection.

Company Profile:
Barings is a US$481 billion* global alternative asset manager that partners with institutional, insurance, and wealth clients, and supports leading businesses with flexible financing solutions. The firm, a subsidiary of MassMutual, seeks to deliver excess returns by leveraging its global scale and capabilities across credit, real assets and capital solutions.
*As of March 31, 2026

In today’s environment of persistent inflation, shifting interest rate dynamics and heightened market volatility, investors are reassessing the role of traditional fixed income. 
This session will explore how flexible, multi asset credit strategies can help investors navigate these challenges and capture relative value across global credit markets. By dynamically allocating across a broad opportunity set, multi asset credit can help reduce concentration risk while providing access to harder to reach segments of the market. 
Gain insights into how active management, disciplined risk control and portfolio flexibility may enhance resilience and income potential across changing market conditions.

Workshop Objectives:

Explore how Oaktree Global Credit Select strategy uses a flexible, multi asset credit approach to navigate inflation, shifting rate environments and market volatility—aiming to enhance income, strengthen portfolio resilience and seek attractive risk adjusted returns.

Company Profile:

Brookfield is one of the world’s leading alternative asset managers, with over $1 trillion in AUM across infrastructure, renewables, private equity, real estate, and credit. Our scale, global reach, and hands-on approach give us the insight to uncover opportunities that others may overlook.
With the perspective of an owner and the experience of an operator, we focus on creating lasting value and attractive returns for private wealth investors across economic cycles. Grounded in investment excellence and aligned interests, we help investors navigate markets with confidence—building portfolios positioned for what’s next.
Learn more at https://privatewealth.brookfield.com/

This workshop will provide a clear, practical understanding of EQT Nexus PE and EQT Nexus Infrastructure - two evergreen strategies designed to make institutional-quality private markets accessible to individual investors.
We'll walk through how each strategy works, what drives returns, and how they complement one another within a client portfolio. Advisors will leave with a confident grasp of the EQT investment approach, the role of semi-liquid structures in modern wealth management, and how to position these strategies in client conversations.
Whether you're new to private markets or looking to deepen your knowledge, this session equips you with the insights and language to guide clients with clarity and conviction.

Workshop Objectives:

A clear, practical understanding of EQT Nexus PE and EQT Nexus Infrastructure. 

Company Profile:

EQT is a purpose-driven global investment organization focused on active ownership strategies. With a Nordic heritage and a global mindset, EQT has a track record of more than three decades of developing companies across multiple geographies, sectors and strategies, covering all phases of a business' development — from start-up to maturity.
EQT has €270 billion in total assets under management (€141 billion fee-generating) as of 31 December 2025, across two business segments - Private Capital and Real Assets. Rooted in the Wallenberg family's philosophy of long-term ownership, EQT's mission is to future-proof companies, generate attractive returns and make a positive impact. It is ranked the second largest private equity firm worldwide by the 2025 PEI 300.

Private markets are becoming an increasingly important component of diversified client portfolios, driven by the search for return, diversification, and differentiated sources of income. This roundtable will begin with a discussion on why private markets matter today and how wealth managers and private banks across the region are thinking about the role of alternatives within client portfolios.
Dan Tapiero will share perspectives on the current private markets landscape today,, the rationale for alternatives in client portfolios, and the practical considerations wealth managers face when implementing private market strategies for their clients. The discussion will then turn to the challenges of access, execution, and scalability—areas where traditional processes often create friction.
Against this backdrop, the session will explore how technology-enabled platforms such as iCapital can support wealth managers in efficiently accessing, implementing, and managing private market investments. By combining technology, education, and operational infrastructure, iCapital helps translate private market intent into executable portfolios at scale.

Workshop Objectives:

To explore why private markets matter, how wealth managers are allocating alternatives in portfolios today, and how technology-enabled platforms like iCapital support scalable access, implementation, and ongoing management.

Company Profile:

iCapital is a global leader shaping the future of investing for financial advisors, wealth managers, asset managers, and other industry participants. Through its end to end platform, iCapital provides a comprehensive solution to access, manage, and integrate non traditional investments across iCapital Marketplace, Enterprise Solutions, and Data Intelligence. The platform supports the full investment lifecycle, making it easier to learn about, buy, manage, and report on alternative assets, structured investments, and annuities at scale.
Backed by strategic investment from leading asset managers, wealth managers, and service providers, iCapital combines advanced technology, data connectivity, education, and research to drive better outcomes. As of February 28, 2026, iCapital services nearly $1.2 trillion in assets globally and supports over 3,300 wealth management firms and 122,000 active financial professionals. Headquartered in New York, iCapital operates globally with major hubs across Europe, Asia, and North America.

In this workshop, we will showcase Lord Abbett’s Opportunistic Credit platform and:

• Challenge benchmark constrained approaches by examining how focused, high conviction strategies can uncover more durable alpha through credit cycles.

• Examine the structural drivers of volatility in today’s credit environment – and how a conviction-led approach can turn periods of dislocation and risk aversion into opportunity.

• Learn how we translate views into high conviction, catalyst-driven credit exposure – targeting mispriced, overlooked segments of the market where we believe price catalysts have the potential to drive repricing and accelerate total return.

• Evaluate how an opportunistic credit allocation can complement existing traditional and alternative fixed income positions in portfolios

Workshop Objectives:

With its ability to capture dislocations, capital structure complexity, and liquidity premiums – we explore why opportunistic credit is increasingly viewed as a strategic allocation in portfolios.

Company Profile:

Lord Abbett is an independent, privately held, and employee-owned global asset manager focused solely on investment management. Founded in 1929, we have built a deep, credit-led platform designed to serve the evolving needs of institutional and private clients globally and currently manage approximately $250 billion in assets.
We were among the first Multi-Sector Credit investors, dating back to 1971, and have managed active credit solutions across market cycles for close to 55 years. This philosophy remains central to how we think about credit mandates, spanning duration, liquidity, structure, and the full risk/reward spectrum.
Today, we offer an integrated, end-to-end credit platform across public and private markets including investment grade, high yield, structured credit, bank loans, opportunistic credit, and private credit strategies. 

The income landscape has shifted — and with it, emerging market debt has become a compelling passport to opportunity for today's fixed income investors. The question is no longer whether to make that journey, but how to navigate it with intelligence, discipline and conviction. 
Neuberger will share why a short-duration approach may offer the most compelling route to intelligent income — capturing attractive carry across emerging markets while meaningfully reducing sensitivity to US rate volatility and broader market uncertainty. Through a focused lens on shorter-dated, hard-currency Emerging Markets debt, we believe investors can chart a course to a resilient and efficient source of yield, underpinned by improving fundamentals and greater downside discipline. Short on duration. Long on opportunity — a durable building block that earns its place within a diversified fixed income portfolio.
Join us on this journey — and discover the case for short duration emerging market debt.

Workshop Objectives:

Explore how short-duration hard-currency Emerging Market Debt can deliver intelligent income beyond borders—capturing attractive carry while reducing US rate sensitivity as a resilient building block for portfolios.

Company Profile:
Neuberger was founded in 1939 to do one thing: deliver compelling investment results for our clients over the long term. This remains our singular purpose today, driven by a culture rooted in deep fundamental research, the pursuit of investment insight and continuous innovation on behalf of clients, and facilitated by the free exchange of ideas across the organization.
As a private, independent, employee-owned investment manager, Neuberger is structurally aligned with the long-term interests of our clients. We have no external parent or public shareholders to serve, nor other lines of business to distract us from our core mission. With our employees and their families invested alongside our clients—plus 100% of employee deferred cash compensation directly linked to team and firm strategies—we are truly in this together.

Recent market headlines have refocused investor attention from headline yields to portfolio resilience. Join PGIM’s session to explore a differentiated private credit approach through covenant design and lender protections, across both sponsored and non sponsored opportunities in the expanded middle market. We will examine how structure, selectivity, and underwriting discipline matter most when liquidity pressure and sentiment distort markets, and how these factors can differ meaningfully between large-cap and core middle market lending. We will explore why disciplined managers, with conservative leverage and cycle-tested workout capabilities, are often better positioned to preserve capital across market cycles.

Company Profile:

PGIM is the global asset management business of Prudential Financial, Inc. (NYSE: PRU), with $1.5 trillion in assets under management (as of Dec. 31, 2025). PGIM offers clients deep expertise across public and private asset classes, delivering a diverse range of investment strategies and tailored solutions—including fixed income, equities, real estate and alternatives.  With 1,500+ investment professionals across 37 offices in 20 countries, we serve retail and institutional clients worldwide. 

Today’s investment landscape is shaped by accelerating technology, geopolitical instability, and persistent market volatility—making the search for real value more challenging than ever. AI can reveal patterns and signals at unprecedented scale, but true advantage comes when those insights are refined by experienced human judgement.
 
Join Dr. Joanna Nash as she demonstrates how the RQI Global Value Fund leverages AI driven signal discovery with human expertise to identify undervalued opportunities and enhance resilience in turbulent markets. She will also share how the strategy is continuously engineered to evolve, ensuring the portfolio stays aligned with the realities of today’s rapidly changing global environment.

Workshop Objectives:

To equip participants with an understanding of how AI driven signals, combined with human insights, uncover undervalued opportunities and enhance portfolio resilience in today’s complex investment environment.

Company Profile:

First Sentier Group is a global asset manager focused on providing high quality, differentiated and relevant investment capabilities to deliver exceptional investment performance.
Established in 2008 as part of First Sentier Group, RQI Investors is an active, quantitatively disciplined global equities manager that oversees more than USD 19.3 billion in assets (as at 31 Dec 2025) on behalf of its clients.
RQI Investors builds portfolios using quantitative signals based on their team’s insights and market experience, exploring inefficiencies to select stocks systematically from a broad universe.
RQI Investors tune out market noise and identify original investment ideas, tested by robust research, aimed at delivering outperformance of their respective benchmarks.

As one of the largest allocators to VC & Growth markets globally, StepStone has a 26-year track record of investing into VC & Growth via secondaries, co-investments and primaries.
StepStone Private Venture & Growth (SPRING) – an evergreen strategy – focuses on the “innovation economy” and provides access to the most dynamic companies, technologies and sectors such as Space Economy, Defense Tech, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Tech, Fintech/Payments, Cybersecurity etc.
Our open-architecture model allows us to partner with historically top-performing VC/Growth managers such as Insight Partners, Lightspeed, Andreesen Horowitz, Coatue, NEA etc.

Workshop Objectives:

• Introduction to StepStone Group and its VC/Growth capabilities
• Highlight opportunities in VC/Growth secondaries market
• Outline how clients can gain diversified and efficient exposure into VC/Growth and invest in the next generation of industry leaders within the innovation economy via SPRING

Company Profile:
StepStone Group Inc. (Nasdaq: STEP) is a global private markets investment firm focused on providing customized investment solutions and advisory and data services to its clients. As of December 31, 2025, StepStone was responsible for approximately $811 billion of total capital, including $220 billion of assets under management. StepStone’s clients include some of the world’s largest public and private defined benefit and defined contribution pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and insurance companies, as well as prominent endowments, foundations, family offices and private wealth clients, which include high-net-worth and mass affluent individuals. StepStone partners with its clients to develop and build private markets portfolios designed to meet their specific objectives across the private equity, infrastructure, private debt and real estate asset classes.