Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 527
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Features
Revolution for self-employed
In common with many European countries, Belgium’s public pension schemes are PAYG; also in common with other European countries, future demographic projections show clearly that these schemes will come under huge financial pressures. A recent report of the OECD hghlighted the effects of longevity as the major challenge for Belgium’s ...
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Features
New ways of looking at risk
John Maynard Keynes wrote in 1924 that, “in the long run, we are all dead”. Existential concerns of a rather more pressing nature afflict pension funds in the Europe and the US as they wrestle with a combined shortfall of more than $600bn (€504bn). The ‘perfect storm’ of falling equity ...
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Features
Shareholders become active
Ever since the financial scandals of Enron and WorldCom that rocked the US, and more recently Parmalat in Europe, there has been a growing awareness among fund managers that they should be more actively involved in the running of the companies that they invest in. On 10 January, the European ...
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Features
In praise of risk
“I love risk. I like it because it produces returns for me”, said ABP chief investment officer Roderick Munsters at the 5th annual Institutional Fund Management conference in Geneva. Munsters was one of several industry heavyweights expressing views on the current and potential future challenges facing the pension fund, investment ...
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Features
Schemes warned of 'herd mentality'
European pension funds have been warned about a possible “herd mentality” developing in hedge funds. “There appear to be a lot of pension funds in Europe going into hedge funds because everybody else is,” said Penny Green, chief executive of the Superannuation Arrangements of the University of London. She told ...
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Features
Why evaluated pricing is next
Valuing a bond portfolio is often regarded as a straightforward exercise of obtaining the latest market prices from a group of market makers or an exchange, completely analogous to the equity marketplace. The vast majority of bonds do not trade on a day-to-day basis and, traded over-the-counter, there is a ...
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Features
For your Euro watch-list
In Brussels-speak, a directive is a decision by the EU. It has to be implemented in national law. The Institutions of Retirement Provision (IORP) directive creates pan-European pension funds. It should have been implemented on 23 September 2005, but towards the end of 2005, less than half of the EU ...
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Features
Conflicting priorities
In Hungary, as in many countries, the task of financing the state pension system is a growing problem. As market economics took hold in Hungary at the beginning of the 1990s, the real value of pensions fell away. This in turn made it clear that additional, private, funded pension provision ...
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Features
State Street moving processing east?
State Street sees an opportunity to cut costs by moving some of its processing operations to eastern Europe, says chief executive Ron Logue. “We see eastern Europe as two different types of opportunity,” Logue told Bloomberg TV. “One is in terms of product manufacturing, processing at a lower factor cost ...
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Features
More to do on settlement
Tim Steele Alongside safekeeping, settlement is one of the foundation stones of the classic ‘hold and settle’ custody model, and in theory one of the most straightforward functions performed by a custodian bank. Yet figures produced by UK-based Amaces show that missed settlement deadlines remain a concern. The firm currently ...
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Features
The next big thing?
They could be the ‘new big thing’ in the US savings industry. And like the individual retirement accounts, the new Health Savings Accounts (HSAs) imply putting aside tax free money and investing it in stocks and bonds. Although the sums are smaller, the potential is not: there could be $75bn ...
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Features
A changing marketplace
While it may be natural for European institutional investors to see European equities as a core asset class, what is not so clear is what should be included within that definition, and on what basis managers should be selected. The US market has a culture of much more specialisation of ...
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Features
Making the connection
Although British Telecom (BT), the UK’s incumbent telecoms operator, provides pension schemes in each of the 140 or so countries in which it operates, only a tiny proportion – around 0.3% – of the £34bn €49.5bn) of assets under management are accounted for by the company’s foreign subsidiaries. “The UK ...
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Features
Bond managers: can they predict?
Although we have seen quite a bit of research on the usefulness of equity analyst’s buy and sell recommendations for individual shares, far less research has been done that addresses the overall asset class visions of analysts and strategists. Perhaps this can be attributed to the fact that data providers ...
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Features
Going their own way
While governments across Europe are pulling out all the stops to ensure working people are making enough provision for retirement, the dominant forms of non-state pension schemes vary from country to country. Besides corporate schemes and industry-wide schemes, professional schemes perform a vital role on the pensions stage, even though ...
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Features
Active route away from the crowd
The London Pensions Fund Authority, (LPFA), is one of the UK’s leading public sector pension schemes, with 73,000 members and £3.2bn (€4.7bn) in pension fund assets. It was set up in 1989 as a stand-alone public body to take over the running of the pension fund of the Greater London ...
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Features
Evaluating performance
Evangelism is in short supply in the pensions industry. So it is refreshing to find odd voices that are full of belief. Two such belong to Kevin Sime and Roger Brown of Blacket Research in Edinburgh. Blacket is an independent business seeking ways to evaluate the advice given by investment ...
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Features
How to choose an adviser
In a marketplace crowded with specialist fund managers, many pension funds rely heavily on a consultant to help them search for what they want and haggle once they have found it. But choosing a consultant in the first place, and then later deciding whether to keep the one they have, ...
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Features
Giving good advice
While trustees at pension funds may not always be experts in every field of investment, it hardly seems to matter when not only consultants, but banks and asset managers are only too willing to advise them. Some argue that the independent advice of consultancy firms is the only advice worth ...
