All Features articles – Page 118
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Features
Mariska van der Westen: A bumpy ride
It used to be that the pensions industry was considered staid and dependable and – let’s face it – not the most exciting topic of conversation. But no more. After decades of quietly looking after the nation’s pension savings with nary a hitch, Dutch pension fund managers suddenly find themselves ...
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Features
From Our Perspective: Careful what you wish for
At the end of January, Michel Barnier, the European commissioner for the internal market, told an audience of Dutch pension funds definitively that the Commission will not apply Solvency II rules to pension funds.
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Features
Consultants have their uses
Just under half (45.5%) of respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey use investment consultancy services on a retainer basis. Some 32% use them on an occasional or project basis, 18% use them in other ways, such as a combination of retainer and project basis, and 4.5% never use ...
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Features
TV strikes again
Zembla, a current affairs TV programme in the Netherlands, lit a firestorm in the pensions industry last month after it argued that Dutch pension funds have underperformed consistently over the past two decades, missing out on more than €145bn in unrealised returns. The programme claimed that funds had generally invested too much in risky assets and that trustees lacked the necessary expertise to look after Dutch workers’ pension savings. It even went so far as to accuse the industry of “bad management”.
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Features
Belgium’s conservative custodians
Iain Morse finds regulation change may force some smaller captive custodians to re-think their business model
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Features
Call off the funeral
Since the dotcom bust investors have endured a long period of headlines announcing the ‘Death of Venture Capital’. So why are practitioners telling Martin Steward to expect a new lease of life?
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Features
Hey you, get onto my cloud
Martin Steward talks to SRL Global about bringing cloud-computing hedge fund portfolio infrastructure to the pensions community
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Sugary words
We have time on our hands at Wasserdicht Pension Funds. Fiduciary managers have given up calling us; they have finally understood we do not want to be a part of this inexplicable momentum, the movement that outsources everything to the hands of supposed expert practitioners. Even in this we recognise that momentum and value are negatively correlated!
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Features
Regulating Europe
Gail Moss highlights key legislative and regulatory developments for pensions across seven European countries
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FeaturesForest funds snapshot
Céline Claudon presents the key findings from IWC’s comprehensive database of institutional timberland investment funds
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Features
In the media glare
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Jeroen van der Put, executive director of the PNO Media Pension Fund, about the importance of sustainable management in its asset allocation and risk management
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Features
Rate rise offsets returns
Rising bond yields were the bane of some Dutch pension schemes as the industrypublished its fourth-quarter and year-end results for 2010.
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Features
Plan the work, work the plan
Another month, another discussion about other comprehensive income. But more than that, the extraordinary meeting of the International Accounting Standards Board on 2 February served to underline a maxim that the London-based standard setter has consistently ignored: plan the work and work the plan.
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Features
The Engaged Investor: UK code, global practice
The UK Stewardship Code has inspired much discussion and activity overseas. However, Nina Röhrbein discovers significant obstacles to implementing something similar in other countries
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Features
Schemes defy euro-zone uncertainty
Pension funds and investors in general faced an uncertain 2010, thanks in large part to the uncertainty around the euro-zone’s future.
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Features
Do investment innovations work?
The current crisis will be the mother of innovation. But Amin Rajan cautions that, after a traumatic decade, it is also time for a reality check: which of the modern innovations have worked, which have not, and why?
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Features
Repeating the pensions mistake
Think back to 2006. Armed with a vague plan for its supposedly joint effort with the US Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB), the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) set out to address the measurement challenges presented by so-called contribution-based promises. For its part, we were led to understand that the ...
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Features
Get the message across
Respondents to this month’s Off The Record survey were evenly split on the most important form of communication with their members or participants. Some 30% believed postal correspondence to be most important, while the same number favoured their fund’s website. When asked this question a year ago, a majority of 38% stated that postal correspondence was most important, compared with 26.5% for website communication.
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Features
Rare all-in business
The Danish pension and asset management industries are big enough to offer global custodians some glittering prizes. The mighty ATP, with assets in excess DKK610bn (€82bn) and effectively part of the state pension system, selected BNY Mellon as its global custodian in 2006.
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Features
Reality check
Anton van Nunen argues that instead of focusing on an undeliverable level of security, the Dutch regulator should recognise that 100% certainty is not attainable for pensions
