Asset Allocation – Page 251
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Features
Power to the lay trustees
An extremely important development in the UK pensions industry over the past few years has been a significant change in the role of pension scheme trustees. For example, the Myners report, although highlighting the major issues around the institutional investment market, concluded that trustees are “at the heart of the ...
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Spreading the load
The first tenders to be put out into the market by the NTMA were those to find the advisers that would help it in the mammoth task of implementing a suitable investment strategy, appointing the requisite investment managers, selecting an appropriate custodian and choosing the best transition manager to bring ...
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Slipping silently into the markets
While the appointment of 15 investment managers to manage e7bn in assets is in itself no mean feat, the transition of the lion’s share of the assets from cash deposits to market via 14 different investment briefs left the NTMA – in conjunction with Watson Wyatt, the consultant appointed to ...
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Siemens targets Mittelstand plans
With 450,000 employees, Siemens is Europe’s largest employer and ranks among the biggest globally. While the group’s pensions liabilities at E19bn may not be the same as some of the giant US corporations, Siemens has been making determined efforts to put in place a structure that would not just manage ...
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Wilshire provides risk system
In its search for a risk management system for the fund, the NTMA finally settled on US analytics specialist Wilshire. Mike Olson, managing director of Wilshire’s London office, explains that the NTMA is using three different products from Wilshire: a product named ‘Atlas’ for equities, ‘Axiom’ for fixed income investments ...
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Weathering the storm
After a period of relative stability, analysts are reporting renewed caution and uncertainty in Europe’s markets, brought on initially by the threat of terrorist attacks and war, and now by the WorldCom affair. “Quite frankly this is another accounting scandal that we could do without,” says Catherine Reilly, an economist ...
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Keeping tabs on 100 schemes
With more than 60,000 employees worldwide, the basic retirement benefit guideline at British American Tobacco (BAT) is that each scheme should be competitive in relation to local market practice. “Our employees are literally scattered around the globe, with no real concentration in any one country. Trying to coordinate our retirement ...
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Minister involves ABA at highest level
The ABA, the German Occupational Pensions Association, has called on labour minister Walter Riester to defer his plans to scrap deferred compensation in 2008. Speaking at the association’s annual conference in Bonn, the chairman of the ABA Boy-Jürgen Andresen, said he would prefer to see the deferred compensation scheme, remain ...
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Upsetting the apple cart
Defined contribution (DC) is poised to make a clean sweep of collectively agreed nationwide pension schemes in Sweden. One after the other, these schemes have become contribution-based. In 1996 the plan for blue collar workers in the private sector was changed from a defined benefit (DB) to DC scheme, known ...
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Putting new building blocks in place
The pension scheme for construction industry workers in Ireland is very different to other Irish plans. Not only is it an industry-wide scheme, it is also a statutory scheme. “Apart from the national social welfare system, ours is the only statutory scheme in Ireland,” says Pat Ferguson, administrator of the ...
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Steel schemes break mould
When the employers and the trade unions in the Belgian metal industry came together in 1999 to discuss the formation of what was to become Le Fonds de Pension Metal, they were conscious they were breaking the mould. It was the first time that a sector-wide plan had been contemplated ...
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Spending the risk budget
Risk budgeting is a multi-faceted problem, and there are many kinds of interpretations. These arise from the different ways we can define risk and the ‘budget’. When we are analysing the risks within a pension fund, it is best to view the pension fund as a part of the sponsor’s ...
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Capture 'pooling' savings with captives
With an increased focus from both human resources and finance on cost-effective employee benefit programmes, we continue to seek ways to contain cost while maximising benefit attractiveness. Increasingly, companies are resorting to the next level of creativity in order to squeeze the bottom line costs, without neces-sarily taking away from ...
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Risk clouds equities
Asset allocation is often emphasised as the most important single decision in the investment process leading to a good result. For portfolio managers a good result, of course, is outperforming a benchmark. As soon as the macroeconomic scenario is established, factors such as expected return on the different asset classes, ...
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The shape of things to come
The new shape of the Belgian pension fund industry is preoccupying Karel Stroobants, the former general manager of the VKG/CPM pension fund and just re-elected as president of the Belgian Pension Funds Association. “I want to do everything possible to put the new Belgian pensions law into place, once it ...
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Reacting to local conditions
The Northern Ireland (NI) economy is made up of small businesses – the figures from the Equality Commission that monitors employment patterns in the province for businesses over 11 employees, show that of the 3,800 businesses in the private sector, over 2,700 had less than 50 employees in 2000, and ...
