All IPE articles in December 2005 (Magazine) – Page 3
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Features
Crisis! What crisis?
The current debate about pensions and about how society can best adapt to an ageing population is distorted by the belief that ageing is a huge economic and social problem, leading to a sense of crisis. Yet the population will not age overnight and we have some 20 years to ...
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Features
Pricing in credit risks
As Bund yields touch down to another all-time low, do investment grade credit spreads also have further to shrink? “We are not back at the (credit spread) lows we reached back at the end of February/early March this year,” says Klaas Smits of Robeco Asset Management. “And we are not ...
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Features
The man with star credentials
The phenomenon of US movie stars crossing the Atlantic to tread the boards on the London stage is now well established – and it looks like the same thing is now happening in the pensions and asset management field. The latest high profile transatlantic transplant is Mark Anson of CalPERS, ...
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Features
Hidden costs of trading revealed
Most trustees have no problem in seeing why investment performance must be monitored. The success or failure of the entire fund is at stake. But when it comes to putting transaction costs under the microscope, the exercise can sometimes seem too arcane to bother with. Still, many pension funds are ...
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Features
Continuing reform focuses on governance and inclusion
The UK pensions industry needs Barclays. It is a market that is full of doom and gloom. It is only fitting then that Barclays should win the IPE European Country Silver Award 2005. For this is a sterling example of how to move forward. The dynamism, enthusiasm and sheer determination ...
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Features
Pension fund contagion fears
European Central Bank president Jean-Claude Trichet has warned that pension funds and insurers could be sources of vulnerabilities that could spread “contagion” in the wider financial system. Trichet, speaking in Frankfurt, pointed out that pension funds and insurers might be “sources of vulnerabilities through their increased interdependences and linkages with ...
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Features
Long life complications
The cost of any promise to provide someone with an annual pension for life depends on how long that person lives. Improvements in mortality have meant that people are living far longer than was anticipated. In the past 40 years, life expectancy at age 65 has increased on average by ...
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Features
Coming to terms with derivatives
Remember 1995? Only 10 years ago or so, most investment managers still felt pretty uncomfortable with derivatives. Derivative traders were an exotic species using Greek symbols and a jargon nobody could understand. No surprise, pension funds hardly used these instruments, or even avoided them in principle. What is a derivative? ...
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Features
Comfort from derivatives
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries – Denmark, the Netherlands and Switzerland – the same question: ‘Do derivatives perform a useful function in pension fund portfolios or are too costly, complicated and risky?’ Here are their answers: Hasser Jørgensen, chief investment officer at Denmark’s PFA Pension which ...
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Features
Streamlined collection system leads where others wait
A reform of the way in which tax and insurance is deducted from employees’ salaries in the Netherlands has prompted the Dutch pension fund Pensioenfonds Horeca & Catering (PH&C) to introduce procedural and technological changes for calculating and collecting employer contributions. This project has earned the fund this year’s themed ...
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Features
Commission clawback
With cost cutting a priority for most pension funds, providers of commission recapture programmes should have no trouble persuading funds to sign up. After all, commission recapture gives investors a systematic way of recouping some of the brokerage commission they pay. But not all pension clients make use of it, ...
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Features
Inaccessible class opens up
Commodities may be latecomers to the diversification game, but market commentators suggest they are winning an increasing share of institutional investors’ portfolios. Changes in the commodities market - driven largely by increasing demands from the booming Chinese and Indian manufacturing industries - have increased demand for commodities, and made them ...
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Features
Chasing new rainbows?
In the last two years, investment banks have truly woken up to the fact that there is a vacuum in the investment product range offered to pension funds. Many houses have set up dedicated pensions groups, and all of them are vying for new business. Some are finding it harder ...
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Features
Still waiting for changes
The source of the major challenge for Portuguese pension funds is clear: it’s the state. But not in the way seen elsewhere in Europe, where governments place investment and other restrictions on pension funds. Rather it’s its all-encompassing presence in the pensions arena and the resulting universally held belief this ...
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Features
More challenges to come
If they haven’t already, many pension fund investment managers will shortly be considering how to position their funds to meet the challenges of the new year and it certainly looks as though the new year will produce just as many challenges as this year has. It does not look like ...
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Features
Portfolio managed to meet global challenges
An important component in creating long-term competitive returns for life insurance savers is to set up an efficient portfolio construction process. In particular, effective portfolio management can best equip a fund to meet global challenges such as the EU occupational pensions directive and the new traffic light model being used ...
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Features
Embracing the challenge of a changing pensions system
It will come as no real surprise to see Barclays walk away again with IPE’s Country Award for the United Kingdom. Last year, it won for its innovative ‘afterwork’ concept, a hybrid defined benefit and defined contribution scheme. This year, its success is thanks to its excellent stakeholder engagement policy. ...
