Cristian Andreoli from Lemanik Invest is our Sales Manager of the Month
14 MAY, 2025
By Jose Luis Palmer from RankiaPro Europe
Cristian Andreoli is the contact person for the Business Development of Lemanik Invest SA in Switzerland. Lemanik Invest, an Investment Boutique that provides its clients base with niche and unique investment strategies, is the Investment Manager of Lemanik SICAV (1.5 billion euro AuM).
Alongside direct business development in close contact with institutional investors (Banks, independent Wealth Managers, Family and Multi-Family offices) Cristian coordinates an international network of Third-Party Marketers by providing them technical assistance on products.
Before covering this role at Lemanik since November 2019, Cristian developed professional experience on Italian market by Prometeia, where he supported Banks and Wealth Managers in Product Selection and Product Governance.
Fluent in Italian, English and German with a start in Spanish, Cristian holds a master’s degree in Finance and a bachelor degree in Economics from the “Università della Svizzera Italiana” (Swiss Finance Institute) of Lugano.
What made you decide to go into the financial sector? Did you have any other vocations? How were your first steps in the sector?
Financial markets have always had a great effect on me, and I am not referring to a rational thinking but to some more unconscious attraction. There is this memory of my mum about a 3-years-old me literally fascinated and to some extent kidnapped in front of a TV showing the daily performance of equity markets. Despite this attraction, during my childhood I developed another vocation, on the back of my grandfather example: passion for the construction of dry-stone walls up to the point that when asked “what you will be as an adult?” I used to answer “home builder, no doubt”. It was during the last years of high school that I rationally understood my vocation, when studying the Us development after the Great Depression I told myself: economics is your way. During university I understood that the financial sector was my field because of its fast innovation pace and ability to always stay ahead of the global things. My first steps in the sector were made within the institutional consultancy world, an experience that taught me to properly work under stress in order to always deliver an extra mile to clients.
What does a typical workday look like for you? What do you enjoy the most about your job?
I do not think a financial salesperson may really have a typical workday. When I moved from my daily routine projects development, which is typical within consultancy field, to this current role of sales I had quite a tough time creating an ensuring daily routine: most of the first evenings were my mind was crowded by thoughts such as “today you did not get to any results, you did not move forward”. I then realized that a typical workday simply does not exist and a salesperson is running a marathon in creating clients’ trust and getting to the result, subscription in your funds, despite financial markets are daily running at a speed that no other sectors in economy understand. If you add to the equation the fact that I am salesperson within a niche boutique investment house, you understand the solution is not that linear.
The possibility of traveling a lot and meeting always new and interesting people from a lot of different cultures, mostly of the time in nice cities, in front of lovely lunches in fascinating restaurants and hotels, is surely an added value to the role.
But this is common for all salespeople; what could be tricky, especially for peers working for larger and best-known companies, is also what I like the most about my job: having hard time before getting to the result, because once you have the clients’ trust and relationship, over all the obstacles, is something undescribed.
In your opinion, what are the key drivers for successful fund distribution? How do you approach building and maintaining relationships with clients?
The fund distribution is basically about two pillars, and this is particularly true within an investment boutique, which must compete within the same arena where the global big players are. On one side you need performing strategies, better if these are interesting, unique and so hard to find in the products’ catalogue of the peers without losing their rational which is the satisfaction of concrete and real clients’ needs. You do not need to develop and manage unique funds that no one needs: you must always be self-critic and open to markets’ feedback. On the other side, you must develop and maintain a reference market to which you can propose your strategies. You cannot survive without understanding who your target investor is, your target channel. Once you understand this, you need to keep on feeding your client base by providing them with interesting, challenging and uncommon but to them helpful analysis according to a service-approach, rather and more than a product-one.
Finally, you do not have to forget you are running a marathon and not a speed race. What does it mean? It is better to create long-lasting trust rather than closing a deal at every cost. Simpler? Truth and transparent to your client, always.
Could you highlight any topic on which investors should focus for the long term?
Risk management. No matter what kind of investment you are considering, you need to first understand the sources of actual and potential risks and then to find your own way to manage these. This means you need a sound risk management process but you need to sticky respect it: human psychology is in fact maybe the largest source of risks when it comes to investment.
How do you stay informed about market trends and changes in the asset management industry?
Peer analysis and global market research (even university papers) are constantly present in my routine. Every day I spend some minutes, mostly in the first part of the day when the sun is still down, your mind is fresher, markets are still closed and investors therefore relaxed, in navigating the net and reading selected news about innovation, trends and potential evolutions. To use an academic but largely adopted method in every industry, it is like performing a never-ending SWOT analysis.
During events and conferences, I really like to exchange ideas and experiences not only with peers facing potentially my same difficulties or trends but also with people perceived as far from the daily arena in order not to miss raising news.
What is your advice to investors, how should they position their portfolios with the current environment?
I could not be luckier than to be asked this question in these weeks and months, when volatility is back and I personally think it is back to stay quite a while. Therefore, my personal advice is to take time to properly select active managers and active strategies. We come from decades of increasing passive strategies, but this is quite normal: in times when everyone may play the role of portfolio manager because quite everything goes up to the point that everyone may start thinking to be a new King Midas, it is self-evident that passive and less expensive strategies get more and more attention and inflows. Nevertheless, and as always in every aspect of human life and finance is definitely not an exception, it is during hard times that you understand who and what really worth.
About risk management I already spent words above.
What is the most exciting thing you have seen in the markets since you started working in the financial sector? And the biggest challenge you had to face?
I was lucky enough to start working in sales within the financial sector only some months before a global pandemic erupted. I do not want to be misunderstood, I would have preferred this never happened to humanity; what I am saying is that if this had to happen, I am professionally happy that this happened when I entered this sector. During those days the already always fast financial landscape increased its speed, and the frequency of unprecedented events just took off: I never thought oil prices could go so negatively, I never thought you could be paid so much to buy, yes not to sell, oil.
Coming to these days I could not imagine that the US president may tell everything and its contrary to the world in a matter of hours.
The biggest challenge? I think it is the next one.
What do you see as the biggest challenges and opportunities in the asset management industry today, and how you address them as a Sales Manager?
Climate change. No doubt about this. This is not just a challenge for the Asset Management, it is a survival passage for humanity rather than the Earth: I am not concerned about the planet, because this will survive, as always done in billions of years; I am concerned about the socio-economic implications of the phenomenon such as large scale migration and tensions (already visible) and obliged change in life-style. Even the latter is not necessarily a problem, but it could degenerate into an issue because of its nature of obligation: when large part of humanity was forced to rapidly change its routine, usually and historically did not result into a relaxed transition, especially in the short term, to be read as: a person life since we are talking about long-term trends. History never repeats the same, but some patterns may be learned. The very same challenge is also a great opportunity. Again, History teaches that in every crisis human beings were able to find solution and develop, of course in terms of important time periods…does the single one has the time to live the problem, find the solution and to live better? Hardly. What is sure is that Asset Management, because of its capability and role of resources’ allocator must be part of the solution, better if at the same pace it find and exploit speculative deals.
As a Sales manager what I can do is to educate myself to be able to share some little pieces of knowledge with clients to start an open discussion on potential solutions, which are nothing but try different ways to get the same results: prosperity in the long run.
When you have free time, what do you like to do?
What I really like, and I feel I need, is to dismiss professional shoes on Friday evening to step in mountain boots and spend time, either with family or friends, physically working in nature, which is a missing component in the professional life of a Sales person, according to the rules I grew up with: never forget where you come from. What helps me in doing that is to taste lunches’ flavour of my childhood. Nevertheless, I developed so many passions and interests that I sometime perceive not having proper free time. Social involvement within different not-for profit organizations occupies, in fact, a lot of my “free” time risking having a second full-time job for the weekend.
When I really need to stop I either abandon myself within a book, a song or a movie, but if particularly tired in an infinite Saturday afternoon nap, or I go fishing in the rivers in complete solitude or again I go skiing if it is the season. I am also found of walking with my girlfriend and her Golden-Retriever, which has a never-ending smile that regenerates you by simply watching at her while she needs to occupy every single centimeter of space. Together with my girlfriend, we love traveling.
