All Features articles – Page 220
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Features
Gearing up for global note
Four European institutions have launched an awareness campaign to prepare issuers and their agents for a new legal and holding structure for international debt securities, to be launched in June. The changeover to the new structure is being driven by EU monetary policy. The New Global Note (NGN) is a ...
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Features
Progress means growing pains
In Hungary the average state pension stands at around HUF57,000 (E229) per month, and only around 10% of the population have state pension of more than HUF100,000. Not surprisingly, during the 1990s, as inflation took hold and raced ahead of state pensions Hungarians started to realise that they would have ...
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Features
Limits to help technology can provide
Unsurprisingly, software developers say they can help, and many pension funds are turning to technology providers. The Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance Company in Finland, for example, has implemented a risk budgeting application from New York based provider RiskMetrics. Ilmarinen is using RiskMetric’s application on an application service provider basis. RiskMetrics ...
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Features
Pensions the Hibernian way
The Irish pension system was very often thrown alongside the UK system for general discussion purposes and was considered as a mirror image of the UK system 10 years ago. How very wrong that image would be today. Like the Irish economy, the Irish pensions system has had to evolve, ...
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Features
Mission impossible?
Advocates of the so-called 26th regime structure for pan-European pension structure have been seeking to clarify its core benefits in the face of heightened sceptism from the European Commission and market participants. In December, the European Financial Services Round Table (EFR), one of the biggest voices calling for pan-European Pension ...
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Features
Risk now the magic word
Erik van Ballegooijen resigned as the director of the pension fund of TNO technical research institute in Delft, Netherlands, at the beginning of this year What was your first full-time job – and do you remember what you were paid at the time? My first job was as a ...
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Features
MiFID on radar screen
In my June 2005 column I wrote that, given the immense scope of the Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID), and the extremely tight April 2007 implementation deadline set by the European commission, “burying one’s head in the sand is patently not an option”. The good news is that in ...
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Features
A question of mindset?
As a junior actuarial student in 1991, I recall watching a role-play of an actuary and a lawyer in court. The lawyer was cross-examining the actuary, focusing on the fact that the actuary was advising both the trustees and the employer, without apparently drawing any distinction between the two. Fifteen ...
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Features
Why pension pooling is a reality
As a panelist at a recent IPE conference, I was asked: “For all the talk about cross-border pension pooling, is anyone actually doing it?” A fair question, because so much pooling-related activity in recent years has gone on behind the scenes. The design and implementation of a first generation of ...
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Features
Start of the pooling plunge?
Several years of work have gone into Unilever’s giant asset pooling vehicle. After a long period of decision-making, logistics and negotiation, the €5bn multi-fund vehicle, named Univest, was finally launched at the end of last year. The multinational consumer products group set up Univest to provide a central investment pool ...
