Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 520
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Features
Russian evolution
The new Russian pension system, based on the Swedish funded system, was launched on 1 January 2002 when the new pension legislation was enacted. Originally, males born before 1952 and females born before 1956, did not get the right to participate in the funded pension pillar. For everyone else, employers ...
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Features
RBC Dexia's optimism
Monkey fingers, toe-jam football, joo joo eyeballs and walrus gumboots not unsurprisingly failed to put in an appearance, but when Royal Bank of Canada’ s Global Services, its securities services operation and Luxembourg-based Dexia BIL announced last summer that they were to come together to form a new joint venture, ...
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Special Report
Actions speak louder...
The Netherlands is a market which we generally consider to be among the most advanced in terms of institutional investing including attitudes to Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR). But when VBDO, the Dutch Sustainable Investment Association, looked at the voting behaviour of major Dutch institutional investors regarding 280 shareholder proposals at ...
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Features
DB back from the dead
When hedge funds, investment banks and private equity firms get involved it’s a sure sign that there’s some potentially serious money to be made. So what’s the hot new market they’re looking at? You might be surprised to learn that it’s the previously unglamorous field of defined benefit (DB) corporate ...
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Features
Holding to your course
Anyone searching for evidence that the dash from equities into fixed income by pension funds was not a universal phenomenon in the UK need look no further than the West Midlands Pension Fund. The Wolverhampton-based fund, with assets of around £7bn (e9.5bn 8.6bn) administers the Local Government Pensions Scheme (LGPS), ...
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Features
Turning overtime into downtime
Ask asset managers doing business with German corporate pensions what they feel is driving the industry these days, and many will rattle off two acronyms: “CTAs and ZWKs”. No need to worry if these acronyms don’t ring a bell. No one outside of corporate pensions in Germany has a clue ...
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Features
Salary conversion under threat
To continue to safeguard German pension provision in the future, the general aim is to strengthen funded private and company pension schemes. In the field of company pensions, which in the past has been used fairly cautiously in Germany, the legislator has risen to the challenge by implementing significant changes ...
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Features
Nuclear option for IORP?
After a somewhat quiet period, the directive on occupational pension funds is now very much back on the agenda at Brussels. It may be hard to believe but it’s now almost two and a half years since the Institutions for Occupational Retirement Provision (IORP) directive passed into European legislation. Member ...
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Features
Caution is king
BVV is Germany’s largest Pensionskasse with total assets of €16.9bn at the end of 2004, according to data from the German regulator BaFin. Total assets were nearly three times their level in 1990 and also make BVV nearly three times the size of its nearest rival; BVV’s membership stood at ...
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Features
Europe on slow crawl upward
Yield curve/duration Yield curves have been adjusting to investor forecasts on what the European Central Bank (ECB) might do next. Whereas last month there was debate about whether there would be another rate hike in the first half of the year, the consensus is now swinging to the opinion that ...
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Features
Land of opportunity for custodians
With a large base of unfunded pension liabilities, global custodians view the German market as one ripe with opportunity. In the past few years, all of the main global custodians have entered the German market, despite an oversupply of local depot banks. “Depot bank and fund administration in Germany in ...
