Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 527
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Features
Finding the right fit
When the French financier Arpad Busson set up EIM as a fund of hedge funds manager in 1992, his only database of managers was his address book. Today, things are done rather differently. EIM operates an intranet ‘window’ with software which enables its 41 analysts and portfolio managers to gain ...
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Features
A different kind of risk
People are living longer. It may be good news for the population at large, but pension fund managers will not be celebrating. Longevity risk has become a serious issue to grapple with. Annuities are costing more, and insurers are getting agitated, demanding more information from pension funds and raising their ...
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Features
The bottom line of catastrophe
Politicians will tell you that everything changed on 11 September 2001. But then again, so will insurance companies. For the first time, hedging a bet against a major catastrophe, in the form of a terrorist attack, does not seem like a good idea. Unsurprisingly, insurance companies are still reluctant to ...
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Features
How pension funds are addressing biometric risk
Pension funds are dealing with biometric risks in a number of different ways. A few of them explain their particular approaches . ABP, Netherlands “We fund our benefits 100% by ourselves. We are large enough to bear the risks,” says Alexander Paulis, chief actuary at the largest pension fund ...
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Features
UK bonds meet robust demand
The Debt Management Office in the UK says its auction of long-dated government bonds has met a “robust result”. A DMO spokesman declined to speculate on the buyers. But he said: “It’s a fair bet they’ll find their way to the people you’d expect to be buying.” He cited statistics ...
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Features
Pensions promises - made to be broken?
Faced with demographic and accounting pressures, many European companies that sponsor defined benefit (DB) pension plans are seeking to change the terms of this promise by moving the pension fund risk they bear from themselves to their employees. The simplest way for them to do this is to close the ...
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Features
Going for full disclosure
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries – in Austria, Estonia and Portugal – the same question: ‘What factors do you have to disclose?’ Here are their answers: Robert Kitt is fund manager at Estonia’s Hansa Investment Funds which has second pillar AUM of €155m and third ...
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Special Report
Driving the outcome
As the links between intangibles – environmental policy for example – and corporate performance are strengthened so it is clear that they also are generating an increasingly large portion of corporate growth and shareholder value. This explains the increasing demand for information about these aspects of corporate activity, from the ...
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Special Report
Taking things seriously
Socially responsible investment specialists EIRIS have found that 24% of companies worldwide have good or advanced systems in place to manage social, environmental and other ethical (SEE) risks. Published recently, the survey, entitled ‘SEE Risk Management: An analysis of its adoption by companies’, analysed companies in Europe, the Asia-Pacific region ...
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Features
Changing managers can destroy value
The hiring and firing of investment managers by institutional investors in the UK and US can be a value-destroying activity, according to a report by global investment consultant Watson Wyatt. The paper states there is “room for improvement” on the part of institutional investors when it comes to decisions about ...
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Features
Activity across a broad front
In two years’ time the status of Belgium’s self-employed as the poor relations of state pension provision should be a thing of the past. This is one of a number of challenging projects that have been exercising the powers that be in Belgium. The idea was that the self employed ...
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Features
The challenges lying ahead
Hugo Clemeur of the Association of Belgian Pension Funds, Brussels Apart from the preoccupations caused generally by the demographic evolution compounded with slow economic growth, the second pillar pensions sector in Belgium faces a number of challenges of which I would mention only three, although many more could be mentioned ...
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Features
Working in a data minefield
Sector funds were introduced at the beginning of 2004 following the enactment of the Vandenbroucke Law to broaden membership of second pillar schemes. While this aim is well on the way to being achieved other challenges remain. When the law became effective, some sectors already had in place a Fonds ...
