Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 523
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Features
Who's afraid of the D-word?
Derivatives - the portmanteau word for futures, options and swaps - send shivers down the spines of the boards of many pension funds, who see them as too complicated, too expensive and too risky. Yet derivatives offer a way out of the difficulties that pension funds face in the current ...
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Features
Driven to short-term views
Some 10 years ago, remembers Mn Services interim commercial director Pieter Kiveron, finance minister Gerrit Zalm was quoted as advising pension fund managers to make sure that there were four of them because then they could at least play cards. The implication was that otherwise they would have very little ...
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Features
Going in alternatives direction
IPE asked three pension funds – in the UK, Belgium and Finland – the same question: ‘Do alternative asset classes serve a useful purpose or are they too complex and too expensive?’ Here are their answers: Richard Stroud, chief executive at The Pensions Trust, which has AUM of £3.3bn ...
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Features
Gearing up for changes
In an unguarded moment during a visit to New Zealand last year prime minister Göran Persson told a local interviewer that if the younger generation in Sweden really understood what the country’s new pension system meant in terms of a final pension they would not have accepted it. Although a ...
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Features
RBC Dexia tops R&M custody survey
RBC Dexia Services has topped the latest poll of custody providers organised by R&M Consultants. The new venture, formed at the beginning of this year, retained the top spot held by RBC Global Services, R&M’s 14th annual survey found. “RBC Dexia Investor Services is very pleased to have been ranked ...
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Features
A time for specialists
Global custody may today enjoy a far higher profile than was once the case, but it will nonetheless strike some as incongruous to talk about ‘superstars’ in connection with the often prosaic business of securities servicing. But such rare and fabulous creatures do nonetheless exist, and few would dispute that ...
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Special Report
SRI now in the mainstream?
While European institutional investors have incorporated environmental, social, and governance (ESG) considerations into their investment decision-making methodologies, the big American investors, for the most part, are lagging behind. Will they catch up – and are they even interested? On the surface the figures are buoyant. In the Social Investment Forum’s ...
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Special Report
How to value the future
In this comment, we report the results of research on pension fund trustee decision-making relevant to socially responsible investment (SRI). Based upon a sample of over 150 UK trustees, it is shown that a majority of trustees believe there are significant barriers to the implementation of SRI. At the same ...
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Features
Broadening the perspective
Quelle année? Ah yes, 2004. A particularly good year. Now, more than a year on from the requests for proposal issued by the Fonds de Réserve pour les Retraites (FRR) the impact on the market is clear. A gradual maturing of attitudes and approach received a massive boost from the ...
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Features
Custodians face global challenge
With assets under management of €814bn (according to the Lipper pan-European fund flows report of November 2005), France is the second largest funds market in Europe behind Luxembourg. France holds just over 19% market share, behind Luxembourg’s 28% but ahead of the UK on 11%. The funds industry in France ...
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Features
Consultants thrive in new climate
A country where pensions institutions hardly used consultants at all is now coming around to the idea. Consultants in France see their local pensions market developing steadily, helped by the new investment tools created by legislators three years ago. And they say that pension funds are increasingly likely to turn ...
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Features
Actuaries take on piloting role
For French companies, the financial year 2005 is the first year of compulsory use of the new international accounting rule IAS 19. In the meantime, the European directive on Institutions for Retirement Provision leads to more actuarial services, pension actuaries are concerned in some specifically French benefits such as as ...
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Features
Proving FRR's credentials
Almost five years after its creation, the French Fonds de reserve des retraites (FRR) has experienced only one full real year of financial management, in 2005. Let’s remind a brief history of the FRR. France, like many others, has to face a retirement problem with its existing system being unable ...
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Features
New environment for pensions
Following the law on pension reform in 2003, the different regulations that we were all waiting for have finally been published. The result is a much clearer (and attractive) pension environment than before. Companies can sponsor three tax-favoured retirement systems – traditional DC and DB plans, and the new locked-in ...
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Features
Portability plan in limbo
Despite the commission’s prevailing optimism that last-minute tweaks would have saved its pensions portability proposal from sinking beneath a quagmire of inter-governmental wrangling, those that are now handling the dossier say that it is looking decidedly more troublesome than they first allowed for. For one thing, Austria, which currently has ...
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Features
EU action may boost funds
With the exception of Italy, Denmark and Sweden, all EU member states apply either the EET or the TEE system to pension taxation. EET means that the pension contributions are ‘exempt’, that is the contributions are deductible from the taxable income, the investment results of the fund itself are also ...
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Features
A hitchhiker's guide to LDI
Once the decision has been made to implement a liability driven investment (LDI) strategy to provide protection against interest and inflation rate movements, the implementation process still lies ahead. There are a multitude of different areas in the implementation process that will require simultaneous attention. It is vital for the ...
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Features
Europe on slow crawl upward
Yield curve/duration The ECB duly raised its Refi rate to 2.5% on 2 March, a move which came as no surprise to market participants. What had more influence on the short end of the yield curve were comments from the ECB. Firstly, president Trichet said the bank was “ready to ...
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Features
Dipping a toe in the water
Investing in alternative assets by French pension funds is still not common. “This is generally due to a poor understanding of alternative betas and especially the restrictive regulations,” says Noel Amenc, professor of finance and director of the Edhec Risk and Asset Management Research Centre. Other observers point to the ...
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Features
Evolving the system
French retirees draw two or three pensions. The basic pension is paid by the state social security system. On top of that there is a complementary pension paid by an Arrco institution and, for managers, a management pension from Agirc. On average the basic pension represents 60% of their total ...
