All Features articles – Page 94
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Features
Buyout market in flux, but outlook rosy
Over the summer, the UK de-risking market has seen significant deal activity, as well as a number of important changes. Lucida, closed to new business since late 2012, was sold to rival Legal & General, while Goldman Sachs announced its intention to sell Rothesay Life, which itself acquired Paternoster less ...
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Features
Conceptually challenged?
Back in April, the International Accounting Standards Board was debating the content of its discussion paper on the International Financial Reporting Standards conceptual framework.
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Features
Webb’s policy challenges
The achievement may seem modest, but September 2013 marks 40 months since Steve Webb became pensions minister, a junior post within the UK’s Department for Work and Pensions, but one with far-reaching influence over the design, structure and, by extension, asset allocation of occupational pensions in UK.
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Features
Clwyd: Cultivating the difference
Nina Roehrbein speaks with Philip Latham, pension fund manager at Clwyd Pension Fund, about its unusual asset allocation strategy
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Features
Reform saga continues
The long and winding tale of Dutch pension reform entered a new chapter in July, when the council of ministers signed off on a consultation document outlining changes to Dutch pension legislation, in particular the financial assessment framework (FTK).
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Features
The EM story is evolving, not ending
This month will mark five years since the Lehman bankruptcy, years that have seen some changes in pension fund attitudes to risk. Counterparty risk now matters. There is ‘tail risk’.
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Features
Nurturing Europe’s mid-market
Taron Wade and Alexandra Dimitrijevic look into efforts to expand Germany’s Schuldschein debt private-placement market to the rest of Europe
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Features
More than meets the eye
The usual selling point for ETFs is that they are cheap, but that has rarely held for institutional investors. Anthony Harrington finds less obvious, but arguably more compelling, advantages
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Features
A future for swaps?
Pension funds facing new derivative-market regulation are increasingly willing to consider alternatives to traditional swaps, according to Cécile Sourbes. But the jury is still out on interest rate swap futures
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Features
UK joins the race
A new tax-transparent fund, launched this summer, puts the UK on the map for pension pooling. Gail Moss explains
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Features
What’s on the menu?
As CIO of the Wasserdicht Pension Funds in the Netherlands, I have quite a bit to do with our fund’s boards and committees. I am on the management board of what we now call the ‘investment bureau’ and in that role I have to sit in on many trustee board meetings as an observer and answer questions.
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Features
APG looks to swap futures to reduce costs
APG, the €336bn pensions provider and asset manager, is studying the possibility of using swap futures – a derivative instrument under development in the US – as a means of cutting the cost of initial margins in central clearing.
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Features
Insurers deal with low yields
Writing from an equity research perspective, John Hocking outlines an approach to re-risking that could benefit insurers both with Solvency II and in the eyes of rating agencies
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Features
German investors defy tough year
Frank Schnattinger outlines the findings of IPE’s seventh annual survey of German institutional investors
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FeaturesA high-yield lesson from history
Richard Ryan warns investors not to respond to apparently tight spreads in investment-grade bonds by simply stretching for the extra 260 basis points available from high yield
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Features
Rating hybrids
Issuance of hybrid capital in Europe surged at the start of the year and is likely to remain elevated in the near term. Taron Wade discusses how such instruments are rated and why new issuers are getting involved
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Features
Accounting: But what does it mean?
The April meeting of the International Accounting Standards Board set the scene for yet another rushed consideration of draft chapters for inclusion in the conceptual framework discussion paper. The document is to be published in July.
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Features
End to the first act
Six years since the idea was first raised, the European Commission has finally drawn a curtain on its proposal to apply rigid risk-based solvency requirements – pillar one of Solvency II – on occupational pension funds in IORP II. At least for now, since Michel Barnier, the commissioner for the single market, has made it clear that this is a postponement, not a policy abandonment.
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Features
Focus Group: Service providers or trusted advisers?
Perhaps it should come as no surprise that all 28 respondents to this month’s Off The Record poll thought the client relations skills of the overall asset management industry were merely good to mediocre – but when it came to the manager they have known best or longest, almost all rated them good to excellent.
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Features
Taking the sugar out of the alphabet soup
Jeroen Dijsselbloem has been taking sweeties away from the finance industry again. The Dutch finance minister and Eurogroup president has told pension funds not to expect the same inflation premium on future PPP projects that they enjoyed on the N33 motorway deal.
