All Features articles – Page 95
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Features
Directing the directive
Cécile Sourbès asks Matti Leppälä, secretary-general and chief executive of PensionsEurope, to discuss the next steps for the revised IORP Directive
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Features
Defining the trustee chair
The rise of LDI, market turbulence and regulatory challenges have all helped to change the role of the trustee chair, according to Gail Moss
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Features
The solutions business
‘We’re in the solutions business!’ These were the words I was greeted with at the Worldwide Institutional Investing Conference inLondon recently. A fiduciary manager was presenting his vision for pension funds, and all kinds of jargon were thrown out – integral fiduciary management, partial mandate outsourcing, delegated CIOs and segregated diversified growth fund mandates.
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Features
The case for the investment book of record
It is essential for investment decisions to be based on accurate and complete information, but obtaining that in the form of an investment book of record is easier for some asset managers than others, according to John Mayr
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Features
Attention moves to portability
Eight years have passed since the European Commission introduced its first proposals on a Pension Portability Directive, and yet, so far, there has been no sign of this coming to fruition. Back in 2005, it introduced a proposal for a directive aiming to improve the portability of supplementary pension rights.
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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.
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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
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
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
Rock ‘n’ roll yield
Music publishing rights are a proven inflation-sensitive cash-flow asset, and Martin Steward finds that fast-changing music consumption habits are generating not threats, but opportunities
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Features
Unease over debt and politics
This month’s Off The Record poll reveals that, while some of the fear has been taken out of the euro-zone situation over recent months, no-one feels certain we are past the worst. Asked to identify the biggest risk to the integrity of the zone, a few cited threats such as ...
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Features
Satellites in orbit
Christoph Ryter, CEO of the Swiss retail group Migros’ Pensionkasse, explains his fund’s diversification strategy to Nina Röhrbein
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Features
They want our money
In the Netherlands, our politicians want our money. They’ve got some of it already, in the form of our government bond holdings, and now they want some more.
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Features
The vain search for harmony
The European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) dropped something of a bombshell in early April with its preliminary results for the first quantitative impact study (QIS) on the revised IORP Directive.
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Features
Unsubtle financial repression
Dutch politicians are acutely aware of the size and importance of pension funds and want pension assets to be channelled back into the domestic economy.
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Features
Keeping hold of deferred members
Pension funds need a robust strategy to keep track of deferred members and to communicate with them in the right way. Gail Moss reports
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Features
Danish fund reverses stance on foreign equity
Foreign listed equities are again being targeted by Denmark’s DKK600bn (€80.5bn) statutory pension fund ATP, having sold off all such holdings two years ago. Since then, the listed equities portfolio has consisted of only domestic shares. ATP’s CIO Henrik Gade Jepsen says that, in the long term, the fund will focus on building up its foreign equity exposure.
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Features
Fallout from Ruslan and Cyprisia
Iain Morse assesses the consequences of the Cyprus bailout for the banking and wider financial services industries
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Features
Waterford Crystal: shattered illusions of safety
When famed manufacturer Waterford Crystal went into insolvency in 2009, it set in motion events that affected pension funds in Ireland and the UK.
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Features
The coup de grace
Roxane McMeeken met with John Kyriakopoulos, the man whose huge bet on Greek bonds paid off dramatically for the country’s largest pension institution
