Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 553
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Features
Approach to IT still uneven
Performance and risk are growing concerns at Austrian pension funds and to better measure and manage these factors, the funds are implementing a range of third-party and in-house developed applications. Some funds are using spreadsheets or programming applications from scratch, while others are making use of the performance and risk ...
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Features
Land of good intentions
Iceland has a population of only 300,000 and a GDP of €7bn. However, there are around 20 pension funds worth well over a hundred million euros, with the biggest ones worth more than a billion. But private equity as a pension fund asset is still in its early stages, though ...
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Features
Patience is the watchword
The €560m Nordurlands Lifeyrissjodur is a pan-industry private pension fund for employees in Iceland’s Northern Province. Its 12,000 members include workers in the fishing and manufacturing industries, as well as the service sectors. The hybrid scheme is biased towards the defined contribution model, although it is obliged to pay a ...
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Features
Covered bonds wagon rolls on
German Pfandbriefe have never defaulted in their more than 230-year existence*, a pretty amazing feat given the turbulent times Germany and the rest of Europe experienced over that era. It has long been this ‘safety’ aspect of Pfandbriefe which has been one of the most attractive features for investors. “We ...
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Features
Europe opens up
The geographical spread of covered bonds across Europe is still widening, as more countries implement the necessary legislative frameworks permitting the issuance of covered bonds or, as in the UK or the Netherlands, products are structured to mimic the essential features of covered bonds. Within this growth are other developments. ...
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Features
Consultants have a role to play
Although many smaller pension funds do not find it necessary to take on the services of a custodian, it becomes necessary at a certain level of complexity. In the UK, at least, if a fund only invests in pooled funds, there is no need for a custodian since the pooled ...
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Features
Herculean efforts required
Greece’s highly successful Olympic Games - coming hot on the heels of its unexpected triumph in the Euro 2004 football championships - seemed to do much to lift it out of its reputation as a rather lumbering, chaotic nation best known for its Mediterranean climate, cuisine, music and dancing, and ...
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Features
Ringing tone of success
As the bulk of the Greek pension system was mired in mismanagement and overregulation, the country’s incumbent telecoms operator, OTE, has stood out as a beacon of success with a cumulative return since the OTE pension fund started investing in 2002 of 26.37% with returns of 10% in 2003, last ...
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Features
Cyprus' hints of progress
Of the 334,000 people registered with Cyprus’ first pillar social security system around 142,500 have some form of additional pension provision. Some 30,000 of these are employees of central government who benefit from a pay-as-you-go system. The rest are covered by some form of funded or part-funded scheme. Among them ...
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Features
Moving in right direction
The Greek securities services market has in the past been something of a backwater. But recent market infrastructure and pensions reforms have given global custodians hope that there are good times ahead. Like many other countries in Europe, Greece is facing a growing pensions liability problem and the government has ...
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Features
Maltese resurrection
After many years of an exclusively state operated pension system in Malta the occupational scheme seems to be set for a comeback. Company schemes existed in until 1979 but these were replaced by state provision when the government of the day decided that state provision should be good enough for ...
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Features
Staying on top of liabilities
The pension fund of Boots, a UK pharmaceuticals retailer, put liabilities management on the map when it moved its entire portfolio into fixed income securities in 2001. The aim was to achieve closer match between assets and liabilities, thereby removing risk from the sponsoring company’s balance sheet. Few UK pension ...
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Features
Moving into mainstream
Emerging market debt (EMD) is an asset class that that encompasses sovereigns and corporates, high yield and investment grade and dollar as well as local currency instruments. Given this complexity, it is no wonder that market attention has only focused on the headline crises that have left deep-rooted prejudices within ...
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Features
Risk moves centre stage
The UCITS III Directive has set Europe’s cats among the pigeons and has far reaching consequences for all institutional investors as regulators and investment manager trade organisations consider its impact on the broader issues of appropriate, and best, practice. This is none truer than in the field of risk management ...
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Features
Simulating DC outcomes
Defined contribution (DC) pension schemes are complicated financial products. However, they are ideal subjects for stochastic simulation methods1, and research on them has developed to the point where we now have the basis of a commercially feasible DC pension model2. This article begins by explaining the structure of this model. ...
