All Features articles – Page 226
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Features
Go global or go local?
With pensions funding now top of the agenda for sponsors as well as trustees, many multinationals are keen to understand more about the schemes they back. Using a large international consultancy to get an overview can help them do this, and some companies are going down that route. But at ...
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Features
Only place to go to outperform
European investors often have a very strong domestic bias in their equity portfolios, allocating investment elsewhere to global mandates. While many global managers see the US market as a whole expensive and are accordingly underweight, this overall view is heavily influenced by the top 250 stocks which account for 70% ...
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Features
Still in good heart
This is the time of year when Off The Record can invite its readers to take a broad look at what has happened, and what is happening in the world of pensions management and to hazard some guesses about what is likely to happen in 2006 and beyond. Of course, ...
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Features
Wearing an investor's hat
The pension deficits of the FTSE-100 companies calculated in accordance with FRS17 account for around 3% of the total market capitalisation of those companies. Within this there is huge variation with some constituents having pension deficits of more than 30% of their market capitalisation. Therefore, any equity investor should be ...
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Features
Telling it how it is
Client reporting has improved greatly in recent years. Fund managers now produce reports that are almost as slick as those of management consultants. Most pension trustees and officers seem to be happier with what they receive today compared with five or 10 years ago. Standards had to be raised. It ...
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Features
Too open and too loose?
An argument between Age, the older people’s platform, and the European Commission is simmering over how effective the EU’s peer review system is, just as the EU’s executive body gets ready to publish a series of non-binding suggestions for how member states can step up pension reforms. Following the submission ...
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Features
The makings of a winner
Year-end prognostications about the evolution of the securities services product set are always an ill-advised enterprise – after all, it was only after the fourth year of commentators touting it as the next big thing that outsourcing finally deigned to take off as ‘predicted’. However, if I were a betting ...
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Features
Region of myths and misinformation
Many of us had hoped that the emergence in Europe of common accounting standards for pensions (IAS19 or FRS17 in the UK) would have made pension transaction work easier for both buyers and sellers. In some respects it has, establishing a common frame of reference to measure deficits (surplus seems ...
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Features
Rates on the move
After such voluble hints from European Central Bank (ECB) President Trichet himself, the first Euro-zone rate hike since October 2000 ought to have come as no surprise to the markets. Whether or not any move was necessary is less clear, however, and investors are not convinced that after this move, ...
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Features
The secret of our success
That dream has come true in less than a decade. The euro bond market has indeed grown in size and depth to an equivalent of the US market. Yet, in many respects that market is at present different and will keep in the future its own roots and peculiarities. The ...
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Features
The power of pooling resources
This article is from January 2006. While the multinational pooling concept has been around for over 50 years, interest in this global funding mechanism remains as strong as ever. Having gone through periods of reduced priority for multinationals during the 1990s, the recent focus on global governance and Sarbanes-Oxley legislation ...
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Features
Without a ripple
One of the largest pension funds for professionals in the Netherlands, the Doctors Pensions Fund Services (DPFS), recently outsourced the management of its assets from its in-house investment management team to external asset managers. The transfer which involved the movement of €11bn of DPFS assets, was probably the largest transition ...
