All Features articles – Page 211
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Features
RBC Dexia tops R&M custody survey
RBC Dexia Services has topped the latest poll of custody providers organised by R&M Consultants. The new venture, formed at the beginning of this year, retained the top spot held by RBC Global Services, R&M’s 14th annual survey found. “RBC Dexia Investor Services is very pleased to have been ranked ...
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Features
Dipping a toe in the water
Investing in alternative assets by French pension funds is still not common. “This is generally due to a poor understanding of alternative betas and especially the restrictive regulations,” says Noel Amenc, professor of finance and director of the Edhec Risk and Asset Management Research Centre. Other observers point to the ...
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Features
Driven to short-term views
Some 10 years ago, remembers Mn Services interim commercial director Pieter Kiveron, finance minister Gerrit Zalm was quoted as advising pension fund managers to make sure that there were four of them because then they could at least play cards. The implication was that otherwise they would have very little ...
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Features
Long and short of duration
The need for pension funds to match their assets more closely to their liabilities has put the topic of duration at the top of the agenda. Pension funds are faced with the problem of finding fixed income instruments with the right durations. The problem is greatest at the long ...
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Features
New environment for pensions
Following the law on pension reform in 2003, the different regulations that we were all waiting for have finally been published. The result is a much clearer (and attractive) pension environment than before. Companies can sponsor three tax-favoured retirement systems – traditional DC and DB plans, and the new locked-in ...
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Features
Evolving the system
French retirees draw two or three pensions. The basic pension is paid by the state social security system. On top of that there is a complementary pension paid by an Arrco institution and, for managers, a management pension from Agirc. On average the basic pension represents 60% of their total ...
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Features
Harrods facing pension strike
The UK’s world famous department store Harrods could be facing “damaging” strike action following its failure to undertake proper consultations on its decision to shut its final salary pension scheme, the Amicus union has warned. Amicus - representing 100 members - has accused the store of replacing the existing final ...
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Features
A hitchhiker's guide to LDI
Once the decision has been made to implement a liability driven investment (LDI) strategy to provide protection against interest and inflation rate movements, the implementation process still lies ahead. There are a multitude of different areas in the implementation process that will require simultaneous attention. It is vital for the ...
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Features
Learn to love tight spreads
We live today, in a somewhat surreal world where, as Tim Bond, the author of the Barclays Capital Equity Gilt Study points out, £800bn (€1.2trn) of final salary UK pension schemes are trying to buy £41bn of long dated index-linked gilts, which he likens to an elephant trying to squeeze ...
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Features
Portability plan in limbo
Despite the commission’s prevailing optimism that last-minute tweaks would have saved its pensions portability proposal from sinking beneath a quagmire of inter-governmental wrangling, those that are now handling the dossier say that it is looking decidedly more troublesome than they first allowed for. For one thing, Austria, which currently has ...
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Features
Mandatory savings ruled out
Heinrich Tiemann, German deputy minister for labour and social affairs, has reaffirmed that the government has no plans to make retirement saving mandatory. Speaking at a conference, he said that the Riester pension reforms of 2001 had prompted a dramatic rise in demand for second- and third pillar pensions. He ...
