Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 559
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Features
Testing to destruction
The Dutch keep piling the agony on their pension funds. If there are any nuts to be cracked, the regulators and the different commissions come in swinging their sledgehammers. It is almost as if the system has to be tested to destruction before it can be accepted that it works. ...
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Features
Changes herald drift to DC
Norway’s expects that its long-awaited pension reform allowing defined contribution will come into effect at the beginning of next year. Among the main provisions is that all employers have to provide some type of pension plan for employees. This is likely to result in the development of defined contribution much ...
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Features
In the shadow of constraints
Portugal’s private pension system received a blow at the start of this year when the government removed the tax benefits on employee contributions to third pillar arrangements. Ironically, the step was taken by a centre-right government that ideologically favoured private provision. However, it was forced to adopt stringent fiscal measures ...
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Features
Growing investment universe
The Fonditel pension fund in Spain, the fund of Telefonica de Espana, achieved a return on its investments of 6.39% in 2004. “This was achieved basically through the implementation of an adequate exposure to the different asset classes during the year,” the fund says. Fonditel was overweight in equities at ...
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Features
Living with uncertainty
The atmosphere surrounding Swedish pension funds has been positive over the past 12 months with good returns, especially from equities, boosting confidence. However, some see the impending implementation of the EU pensions directive as a cloud on the horizon. One fund that sees adjusting to the pensions directive as a ...
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Features
Cover ratios bite
The challenges facing some of Switzerland’s largest pension funds on the investment front vary greatly given widely differing coverage ratios. The Civil Service Insurance Fund for the Canton of Zurich (BVK) is at one end of the spectrum with a coverage ratio at end-July of 95%. Though up sharply on ...
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Features
Putting the jigsaw together
Dealing with deficits and regulation – they are the two things uppermost in people’s minds in the UK pension industry today. It’s not so much regulation itself that is the intrinsic problem; it’s more in the implementation and uncertainty surrounding it that causes difficulties. As one consultant puts it, it’s ...
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Special Report
Hope for German SRI?
The rather lacklustre progress of SRI in Germany’s institutional investment market was given a boost in July when the Bundesrat, the country’s upper house, passed legislation extending the SRI reporting obligation for Pensionfonds to the much more numerous and asset-rich Pensionskassen. The reporting obligation that requires funds to disclose whether ...
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Features
Right time, right place
Raiffeisen Capital Management (RCM), the asset manager of the Raiffeisen banking group, is an Austrian firm with European ambitions and e30bn in assets under management. It has a dominant position in Austria, where it has 22% share of the overall market and 26% of institutional business, and a growing share ...
