All Features articles – Page 212
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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 ...
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Features
X marks the treasure spot
Danish mortgage bonds have long been an attractive fixed income investment for Danish investors. Now foreign investors have also discovered the advantages of Danish mortgage bonds which offer a considerably yield pick-up and strong diversification effects. “There is no such thing as a free lunch”. A classical economic dogma and ...
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Features
Moving into a new phase
The European directive of 2003 concerning the activities and the regulation of occupational pension funds was adopted following a very long and difficult process. All things considered, the impact of this directive is very limited for a country like France1. Nonetheless it is a good starting point for us to ...
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Features
A time for specialists
Global custody may today enjoy a far higher profile than was once the case, but it will nonetheless strike some as incongruous to talk about ‘superstars’ in connection with the often prosaic business of securities servicing. But such rare and fabulous creatures do nonetheless exist, and few would dispute that ...
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Features
Activity across a broad front
In two years’ time the status of Belgium’s self-employed as the poor relations of state pension provision should be a thing of the past. This is one of a number of challenging projects that have been exercising the powers that be in Belgium. The idea was that the self employed ...
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Features
Shareholders become active
Ever since the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom that rocked the US, and more recently Parmalat in Europe, there has been a growing awareness among fund managers that they should be more actively involved in the running of the companies that they invest in. On 10 January, the European ...
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Features
Active route away from the crowd
The London Pensions Fund Authority, (LPFA), is one of the UK’s leading public sector pension schemes, with 73,000 members and £3.2bn (€4.7bn) in pension fund assets. It was set up in 1989 as a stand-alone public body to take over the running of the pension fund of the Greater London ...
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Features
How pension funds are addressing biometric risk
Pension funds are dealing with biometric risks in a number of different ways. A few of them explain their particular approaches . ABP, Netherlands “We fund our benefits 100% by ourselves. We are large enough to bear the risks,” says Alexander Paulis, chief actuary at the largest pension fund ...
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Features
Giving good advice
While trustees at pension funds may not always be experts in every field of investment, it hardly seems to matter when not only consultants, but banks and asset managers are only too willing to advise them. Some argue that the independent advice of consultancy firms is the only advice worth ...
