All Features articles – Page 215
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Features
For your Euro watch-list
In Brussels-speak, a directive is a decision by the EU. It has to be implemented in national law. The Institutions of Retirement Provision (IORP) directive creates pan-European pension funds. It should have been implemented on 23 September 2005, but towards the end of 2005, less than half of the EU ...
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Features
Why evaluated pricing is next
Valuing a bond portfolio is often regarded as a straightforward exercise of obtaining the latest market prices from a group of market makers or an exchange, completely analogous to the equity marketplace. The vast majority of bonds do not trade on a day-to-day basis and, traded over-the-counter, there is a ...
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Features
Evaluating performance
Evangelism is in short supply in the pensions industry. So it is refreshing to find odd voices that are full of belief. Two such belong to Kevin Sime and Roger Brown of Blacket Research in Edinburgh. Blacket is an independent business seeking ways to evaluate the advice given by investment ...
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Features
Finding the right fit
When the French financier Arpad Busson set up EIM as a fund of hedge funds manager in 1992, his only database of managers was his address book. Today, things are done rather differently. EIM operates an intranet ‘window’ with software which enables its 41 analysts and portfolio managers to gain ...
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Features
The 'generation pact' policy
Considering the expected demographic developments in Belgium, the level of employment in is too low, as a result of which the social security scheme being based on repartition (active people finance the social security system on behalf of inactive people) will come under pressure. In order to safeguard the Belgian ...
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Features
Going their own way
While governments across Europe are pulling out all the stops to ensure working people are making enough provision for retirement, the dominant forms of non-state pension schemes vary from country to country. Besides corporate schemes and industry-wide schemes, professional schemes perform a vital role on the pensions stage, even though ...
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Features
A guarantee of limitations
Last month one of the most famous monuments in Belgium and star of the 1958 World Expo - the Atomium - re-opened after more than a year of renovation work. Newly gleaming in the crisp winter sunshine, this remarkable structure of giant interconnected mirrored spheres presents an enduring – though ...
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Features
Schemes warned of 'herd mentality'
European pension funds have been warned about a possible “herd mentality” developing in hedge funds. “There appear to be a lot of pension funds in Europe going into hedge funds because everybody else is,” said Penny Green, chief executive of the Superannuation Arrangements of the University of London. She told ...
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Features
Plague of history
Last year the outlook for Austria’s pension schemes, the Pensionskassen, was not very promising. “The Pensionskassen started in 1990 as a way to enable companies to shift the risk of corporate pension funds from their balance sheets,” recalls Kurt Bednar of Mercer in Vienna. “They gained in popularity as equities ...
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Features
How to keep in the swim
With defined benefit and defined contribution pension funds totalling around €13bn, Belgium is a minnow compared to its neighbour the Netherlands. However, its status as a Euronext market and as a member of Euroclear Group mean it is not left on the sidelines by securities services players. Renaud Vandenplas, location ...
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Features
New ways of looking at risk
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1924 that, “in the long run, we are all dead”. Existential concerns of a rather more pressing nature afflict pension funds in the Europe and the US as they wrestle with a combined shortfall of more than $600bn (€504bn). The ‘perfect storm’ of falling equity ...
