AXA Real Estate appoints Deborah Shire as Global Head of Business Development

AXA Real Estate Investment Managers (“AXA Real Estate”), the leading real estate portfolio and asset manager in Europe*, with over €40 billion of assets under management as at September 2011, is pleased to announce that it has appointed Deborah Shire as Global Head of Business Development, a new position which carries overall responsibility for Corporate Finance, Investor Relations, Marketing & Communication and Business Development. Reporting directly to CEO, Pierre Vaquier, Deborah will join AXA Real Estate's Management Board and play a key role in leading innovation, supervising product initiatives and coordinating capital raising efforts as AXA Real Estate increasingly focuses on adopting a solutions-led approach to fulfilling clients' objectives.

Ms Shire joins AXA Real Estate from her position as Deputy Head of Structured Finance at AXA Investment Managers ("AXA IM"), where she was in charge of strategy, finance, marketing, operations and product development. Having joined AXA IM in 1998 as a quantitative portfolio manager, Ms Shire then worked alongside the founding team in 2000 to establish AXA IM’s Structured Finance Division, where she became Head of Structured Finance Engineering in charge of product development and structuring. Prior to joining AXA IM, Deborah spent three years working as a project manager at the AXA Group’s Corporate Finance and Treasury Department in Paris.

Ms Shire is a graduate from French engineering school SUPAERO (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace) and holds a diploma of Financial Analyst from the SFAF (French Society of Financial Analysts).

Commenting on the appointment, Pierre Vaquier, CEO of AXA Real Estate, said: “Deborah has a strong track record of creating highly innovative and successful solutions for clients and this, coupled with her extensive experience working across multiple strategies, was a fundamental factor in our decision to appoint her into this newly created and important role. As we focus increasingly on working with our clients to create specific solutions to their investment objectives, we felt it was important to strengthen our Management Board with someone who is able to bring a fresh perspective and new ideas which can be married to our highly experienced and successful real estate teams. I look forward to working with Deborah as we continue to grow the AXA Real Estate business and it gives me great pleasure to welcome her to the team.”

http://www.axa-realestate.com