All IPE articles in December 2006 (Magazine) – Page 4
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Special Report
What the smart CEO needs to know
CEOs and other corporate leaders often lack direct knowledge and experience in managing social responsibility challenges. How can they maintain their focus on value creation while minimising the potential disruptions to their business from these increasingly powerful external forces? There are five essential issues that CEOs should focus on to ...
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Features
Building up pensions or pulling them down?
Europe’s financial supervisory authorities are in an invidious position with regard to occupational pensions. They are damned if they do tighten up on regulation of pensions schemes and damned if they do not. The collapse of the equity markets early in the new century clearly called for some tough action by regulators, but was the action too tough?
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Features
Stress-tests build confidence in future funding levels
Founded in 1968, Amonis is the professional pension scheme for Belgium’s doctors, dentists and pharmacists. It is a hybrid defined benefit and defined contribution structure with €932m under management for some 23,300 active members and 3,500 pensioners. Amonis entered the IPE Awards on the back of its confidence in the ...
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Features
Joining forces to cut costs and boost capacity
Innovation “is our competitive advantage,” boasts Denmark’s PKA Pension Funds collective. It cites four areas it believes backs up this claim: its outsourcing strategy, socially responsible investments, its real estate portfolio and its hybrid structure. “The innovation in outsourcing was to achieve an effective administration policy,” the fund says. A ...
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Features
Post-election pension blues
US pension fund industry players are bracing for the new Democratic Congress. Their lobbyists and attorneys had hoped to obtain some industry-friendly amendments to the new Pension Protection Act, signed last August by President George W Bush. But with the new Democratic majority in both the House and the Senate ...
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Features
Small scheme that thinks big
Don’t be fooled by size. Small can be beautiful. The Robert Bosch scheme is small but it has a big heart and even bigger ambition. It has already notched up a series of firsts: first Pensionsfonds-type scheme to be offered by an industrial group in Germany; the first to receive ...
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Features
Beware ridiculous investment cases
Although commodity markets have been around for centuries, investors’ interest in them has always been quite limited. Over the last few years, however, this has changed completely. Commodities have very quickly become very popular and investment in commodities is growing at an unprecedented rate. It is estimated that over the ...
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Features
DC risks are ‘better understood’
The challenges and problems of defined contribution (DC) schemes were among the points discussed at the Global Forum on Private Pensions organised by the OECD in conjunction with the International Organisation of Pension Supervisors (IOPS) at a conference in Istanbul. “The herd trend from traditional defined benefit (DB) to pure ...
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Special Report
Towards a better understanding
Yasuteru Aizawa of the CSR lobby group IPERI describes his aspirations changing attitudes towards the environment in the boardrooms of across Japan
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Features
Backdrop to the Pacific century
Richard Newell looks at some of the key dynamics at play in the Asian region
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Features
Members back cash pay-outs
Despite the fear of governments, pension plan members prefer cash withdrawals, as David White report
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Features
Back to basics
Pension funds are recognising that getting asset allocation right is an essential first principle. Rachel Fixsen reports
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Features
Strength in depth proves key to top award
To win an award of such high standing as the IPE Gold Award for Best European Pension Fund requires excellence across the board, not just in one particular aspect of a scheme’s set-up. For the award acknowledges not just past and present performance but the way the scheme view its ...
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Features
Attention turns to low returns
Kazakhstan was the first country of the former USSR to implement a pension reform. A funded pension pillar has been working there since 1998. It operates in parallel with the pay-as-you-go system inherited from Soviet times. Along with mandatory pension contributions there are also voluntary and voluntary/occupational contributions. Kazakhstan’s population ...
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Features
New diversity in assets brings high returns
Over the past five years, the State Pension Fund of Finland (VER) has consistently developed its portfolio allocation and its asset management, bringing them up to international standards.Under this policy, a new neutral allocation and an alternative investments segment has been introduced to the portfolio. Other innovations include a new ...
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Features
Right asset mix ensures continued outperformance
Gildi, Iceland’s third biggest pension fund with €2.8bn under management entered the IPE Awards because it believes its portfolio management and excellent performance make it the small nation’s best pension fund. The judges agreed. “At 23%, our annual performance was the best for 2005 among pension funds in Iceland and ...
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Features
Fine art of asset management
In the iconography of European asset management, Dexia Asset Management could be cast as the hero from zero. In the 1990s it was merely a gleam in the eye of the Franco-Belgian Dexia banking group. Today it is one of Europe’s leading asset managers, with over €100bn assets under management. ...
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Features
The FII approval process
Vikrant Gugnani, CEO of Reliance Mutual Fund in Mumbai explains the background to the foreign investment rules: “FIIs were first allowed to invest in India in 1992. Initially the FII holdings in any company were subject to various investment limits. Also funds invested by FIIs had to have at least ...
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Features
Innovative approaches clinch joint awards
The Environment Agency is the leading public body for improving the environment in England and Wales, and its pension fund strongly believes that this corporate mission should also permeate its own investment strategy. The scheme’s aim is to obtain optimum risk-adjusted returns, and it believes that sustainable environmentally responsible investment ...
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Features
Proactive approach wins friends for default fund
With practically half a million members and pensioners in Sweden’s public sector, Kåpan Pensioner is a defined contribution scheme with a guaranteed rate of return and additional bonus. It is in competition with some of the major life insurance companies in Sweden, such as AMF and Skandia, as they can ...
