Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 524
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Features
How to benchmark pension fund costs
It is, suggests Richard Stroud, chief executive of the UK’s Pension Trust, a question of being able to compare like for like. Take grocery shopping. UK Supermarket retailers Tesco and Asda compare their prices in order to attract customers. Why shouldn’t investment managers and third party administrators do the same, ...
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Features
Mandatory savings ruled out
Heinrich Tiemann, German deputy minister for labour and social affairs, has reaffirmed that the government has no plans to make retirement saving mandatory. Speaking at a conference, he said that the Riester pension reforms of 2001 had prompted a dramatic rise in demand for second- and third pillar pensions. He ...
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Features
Harrods facing pension strike
The UK’s world famous department store Harrods could be facing “damaging” strike action following its failure to undertake proper consultations on its decision to shut its final salary pension scheme, the Amicus union has warned. Amicus - representing 100 members - has accused the store of replacing the existing final ...
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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 ...
