Latest from IPE Magazine – Page 566
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Features
Residual or strategic?
Large amounts of pension fund cash are held in current accounts: it is estimated that 40% of all cash is held this way. But money market fund providers say there is a better way. Putting the cash in funds not only generates better returns, but also improves credit security. Money ...
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Features
Risk-controlled repos
With repos, or securities repurchase agreements, many larger pension funds can lend directly, dispensing with the expense of money market fund manager fees altogether. The problem of dealing with the collateral exchanged in the repos process can be a hurdle, but this can be outsourced, says Bank of New York ...
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Features
Cash increases your options
Increasingly, pension funds in Europe are seeking better ways of managing their cash. Peter Eerdmans, senior investment consultant at Watson Wyatt in London, sees two main reasons for this focus. Cash is carried within the fund, for instance by an equities manager who has not invested it, and this may ...
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Features
Managing home bias
IPE asked three pension funds in three countries – in Finland, Ireland and Switzerland – the same question: ‘Do pension funds have a duty to invest in local industries?’ Here are their answers: Bríd Horan, general manager of Ireland’s ESB Pension Fund, which has AUM of e2.8bn. “Irish pension ...
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Features
Use risk wisely
The belief that risk management means merely minimising or eliminating investment risk has few followers today. It is now widely accepted that investment risk is necessary to drive returns, and that it is the function of risk management to enable the asset manager to maximise the use of risk to ...
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Features
The global transformation
We are in the midst of a revolution in the organisation of global markets and the competitiveness of corporate form and functions. This has enormous implications for financial markets and their interest in defined benefit (DB) pension liabilities. Employer-sponsored funded supplementary pensions were a success story in Anglo-American economies and ...
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Features
How BASF has it taped
Let us rewind to the year 1888. In that year BASF was one of the first companies in Germany to set up a Pensionskasse. Fast-forward to the present: Today it caters for BASF’s German employees with a funding of around E4.5bn, and forms part of a network of schemes with ...
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Features
Pensions in a nutshell
Oil giant Royal Dutch/Shell is running a feasibility study on the possibilities of merging its worldwide pension asset and investment advice departments. According to Shell spokesman Henk Bonder the initial focus is on combining the asset and investment advice departments of its UK and Dutch pension funds. This does not ...
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Features
Joined-up thinking
Robin Ellison, the incoming chairman of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF), may not be the first UK pension person to lose their bearings in Brussels. But he’s almost certainly the only one to actually get completely lost in the Belgian countryside. It occurred when he was en route ...
