All Features articles – Page 123
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Features
Pensions Green Paper has industry reaching for fine-tooth comb
The European Commission takes pains to emphasise what its latest Green Paper on pensions does not do. The paper, for instance, does not make any specific proposals. Nor does it recommend increasing the age at which people can draw a pension. Nor does it try to force people to take out a private pension. The only thing the Commission wants the Green Paper to do, it says, is start a debate about “whether and how” the European pensions framework should be developed.
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Features
Jump the hurdle
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Dirk Lepelmeier (pictured), managing director of Nordrheinische Ärzteversorgung (NAEV), the pension fund for North Rhine Westphalia’s medical profession about the challenge of successfully obtaining an annual internal rate of return in a highly volatile market
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Features
Passports to success
Fernand Schoppig presents insights into asset managers’ strategies for international marketing from FS Associates’ survey ‘Cross-Border Distribution of Asset Management Services 2010’
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Features
GPS: Pension fund managers more optimistic than last quarter
European pension funds were more optimistic about the economy in their own countries during the second quarter of 2010. Pension fund managers were also more positive about the financial situation of their own fund than in the first quarter. However, the rise in optimism about the economy in their own ...
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Features
Industry Research:IPE European Institutional Asset Management Survey 2010
The European Institutional Asset Management Survey (EIAMS) this year celebrates its tenth anniversary. Invesco commenced the survey in 2000 and three years ago asked IPE to undertake it.
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Features
Exploiting uncertainty in investment markets
In the first in a series on a new study, Barb McKenzie, Neeraj Sahai and Amin Rajan argue that subdued asset growth is set to drive out mediocrity from the asset industry
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Features
Risk concerns top agenda
This month’s Off The Record survey found that 85% of respondent’s pension fund boards had raised risk management as an agenda item in the last six to nine months. The result of this was that several funds made adjustments to their risk management policies.
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Features
Better late than never
On 29 April the IASB published its proposals to revamp IAS 19, employee benefits, which “aims to make fundamental improvements to the recognition, presentation and disclosure of defined benefit plans by mid-2011. These improvements will make it easier for users of financial statements to understand how defined benefit (DB) plans affect a company’s financial position, financial performance and cash flows.”
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Features
BP oil spill fuels investor concern
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill is threatening to affect more than just the environment. Investors in BP, including pension funds, have been warned they could suffer in terms of both income and regulation if BP’s share price continues to fall and the dividend payment suspension continues beyond Q3 2010.
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FeaturesLessons from Canada
Gail Moss assesses the challenges Canada is facing in the area of workplace pensions
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Features
In the centre of things
Iain Morse finds private equity limited partners in central and eastern Europe hungry for long-term capital
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Know your onions
I am back in the UK talking about our defined contribution (DC) scheme for the UK pension plan. We are discussing managers. I am relatively new to this DC world, but how different can it really be? My colleague from the Wasserdicht UK DC pension scheme is Joe and he says we should not worry because he knows his onions. People say the Dutch and English can be very alike but just to be clear: in Holland we are not focused on onions. He briefs me before we see two managers.
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Features
Pension funds – future farmers
Pirkko Juntunen records the growing popularity of farmland investment in the developing world
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Features
ING OFE: Investing with your hands tied
Nina Röhrbein spoke with Grzegorz Chlopek (pictured), CIO and vice-president of ING PTE, Poland’s second biggest pension fund (with assets of €11.4bn) about the challenge of operating as a large institutional investor in a highly regulated market
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Features
Unipension: Risk, adjusted
Martin Steward spoke with Niels Erik Petersen (pictured) and Søren Bang Andersen of Unipension, the consolidated administration service for Denmark’s pension funds for architects, MAs, MScs and PhDs, agricultural academics and veterinary surgeons
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Features
Open and above board
A chat about catching a plane would seem on the face of it to be a fairly innocuous event. Indeed, amid much fanfare, North Korea’s Kim Jong-Il recently jetted into China. Chairman of the International Accounting Standards Board (IASB) Sir David Tweedie’s staff, however, demanded that his trip to Japan be shrouded in more secrecy than the dictator’s.
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Features
Diary of an Investor: Every ash cloud has a silver lining
A short excursion to London at the end of April turned into a longer stay than I had expected. I had flown over on a Thursday morning for a day trip to make site visits to one or two of our investment managers, and to see our global investment consultant.
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Features
Regime change effects
UK pension funds, consultants and asset managers had been hoping for some form of political certainty ever since the run-up to the general election in May. The outgoing Labour government had set in train a number of pension reform measures, including the launch of its National Employment Savings Trust (NEST) in 2012, designed to sweep up UK workers with no existing pension provision through new auto-enrolment regulations.
