About

An investment funds specialist, Dr Constanze Jacobs was brought in to IKB Deutsche Industriebank to lead the legal support of a new investment business line for the company, now a high three-digit million investment portfolio for the bank. Her private practice career, undertaken in Luxembourg and New York, gave her the outstanding technical skills required to fulfil her role, and Dr Jacobs goes into the other steps she undertook to get the company ready to deal with investment funds. ‘Firstly’ she explains, ‘it was setting up the internal infrastructure and interfaces for the operation of investment funds, educating IKB staff regarding asset management operations and developing and negotiating the contractual frameworks available. After that, we initiated international alternative investment fund distribution operations and launched the fund structures’ on-boarding institutional investors with significant commitments. Throughout all this, I got acquainted with the challenges of business development using my specific legal professional experience’. As the leading legal specialist in investment funds at the company, Dr Jacobs liaises directly with senior management on issues related to this, including with the CEO of the company, on the basis of ‘trust in [her] strong analytic capabilities’. As well as this, she has undertaken an immense amount of work to ensure the company is compliant with the updated regulatory environment in which it finds itself in; in particular, the AIMFD/MiFID II regulations have provided a source of particular focus.