Management

MICHEL LÖWY
CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER

Michel Löwy has been investing in fixed income Asian assets since moving to the region with Cargill’s value investment group in the wake of the financial crisis in 1998. He was soon poached by Deutsche Bank, along with SC Lowy co-founder Soo Cheon Lee and senior adviser Peter Tolhurst, where together they spent the next decade building a consistently profitable and market-leading Asian special situations group.

By the time of the global financial crisis in 2008, when he anticipated that bulge-bracket investment banks would struggle to provide the platform needed, Michel and Soo Cheon made the decision to establish SC Lowy as an independent fixed income specialist.

Boutique investment banking

His role within the firm has evolved since those early days, when his principal goal was to make sure the firm had sufficient capital to operate and, as the only trader, to ensure it was making money. Today, while he still trades the biggest book in the firm and generates trading ideas, more of his time is devoted to management and strategy. As the business has matured, he has overseen an expansion from secondary loans into high yield bonds, debt capital markets and par loans, as well as building SC Lowy’s presence in Europe through an office in London.

International expansion

A Belgian citizen, Michel started his career at Arthur Andersen in Brussels, where he immediately gained a broad understanding of the corporate world. “The advantage of being in a small country like Belgium is that you’re not super specialised,” he says. “Instead of being stuck in a box such as ‘pharma’ or ‘banks’, I had the opportunity to experience many different industries — a construction company one week, then an airport operator, a building materials manufacturer, a brokerage.”

That experience led to a move to Cargill in London, where he first worked for Peter, and then a transfer to Singapore, where he started working with Soo Cheon shortly thereafter.

At SC Lowy, Michel sought to bring all of this experience together — the analytical skills he first developed at Arthur Andersen, the collegial atmosphere of a buyside firm like Cargill and the discipline of a bulge-bracket investment bank, not to mention his own leadership from the trading floor.

Dynamics of distressed debt

Indeed, he has also found an outlet for those leadership skills outside the office — he began coaching his son and several other kids at basketball a few years ago and quickly learned that coaching and trading share many similarities.

“How do you become a good coach? It’s about getting everybody to buy into your game plan and your strategy, working as a team and finding ways to communicate so that everybody works well together,” he says. “On the trading floor, it’s the same thing. You need to get the sourcing, analysts, sales to all work with each other and as a trader you’re sort of the coach in the middle.”

Of course, he is also a competitive person in his own right, and extends this competitiveness to the firm’s charitable activities. He had the chance to reflect on what it means to be a good corporate citizen during a trail-running race in Hong Kong in 2015, when a nine-metre fall off a mountain left him wedged between two trees and dependent on the grace of strangers to rescue him. His conclusion? “You have to do good when you can.”

But you also have to focus on how to do good best. SC Lowy’s answer has been to act with the discipline of an investor through corporate-charitable foundation partnerships and has been involved with the Emerging Markets Foundation, EMpower, since raising money through another trail-running race in Nepal in 2012.