Liam Kennedy

Liam Kennedy

Liam is IPE’s editorial director and a board director of IPE International Publishers Ltd.

He has over 20 years’ experience as a financial journalist and editor, specialising in the field of institutional investment and pension funds. He is also a regular speaker/moderator at industry events around the world.

Prior to joining IPE in 2007, Liam spent nearly seven years at the Financial Times group in London, where he worked as a specialist editor and writer and launched a number of European pension and investment titles.

Contact info

Tel:
+44 (0)20 3465 9300
Email:
liam.kennedy@ipe.com
  • Liam Kennedy at IPE
    Opinion Pieces

    How effective is your shareholder voting strategy?

    March 2024 (magazine)

    F Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function”.

  • Liam Kennedy at IPE
    Opinion Pieces

    Corporate pensions: a close eye on yields in 2024

    February 2024 (magazine)

    The final two months of 2023 saw a return to form for global fixed income and equities, with respectable single and double-digit numbers in each case. After a false start in early 2023, at least for a multitude of asset forecasters, bonds were finally back in the final months of last year.

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Pensions are instrumental in Europe’s unfinished capital markets project

    January 2024 (Magazine)

    This summer will mark 10 years since Jean-Claude Juncker, former EU Commission president, outlined a vision for a European Capital Markets Union (CMU) – a project both uncompleted and still acutely needed.

  • Liam Kennedy at IPE
    Opinion Pieces

    Will social partners carve a new role for themselves in pensions?

    December 2023 (Magazine)

    Social partnership can mean different things in many countries, or very little at all in others. The concept resonates most in continental Europe, where a tripartite framework of social-market capitalism has taken root since the second world war, in which corporatist decision-making involving government, labour and employer voices is entrenched.

  • Feira capital
    Interviews

    Fiera Capital: Montreal’s succession story

    December 2023 (Magazine)

    If Fiera Capital were a retail store it might need a big shop window. It is perhaps better known in the institutional world outside Canada for strategies like real assets but Fiera is a full-service asset manager that is also a big deal in its home town of Montreal.

  • Liam Kennedy at IPE
    Opinion Pieces

    Ireland – future pensions tiger

    November 2023 (Magazine)

    Ireland stands a few policy steps away from the creation of a serious first and second-pillar pensions architecture that will improve the country’s international standing in terms of retirement provision. 

  • Liam Kennedy at IPE
    Opinion Pieces

    Does the UK really need to consolidate thousands of DB schemes?

    October 2023 (Magazine)

    The UK’s so-called Mansion House Reforms are under way. This cluster of policies takes its name from the residence of the Lord Mayor of the City of London, which is the venue for a regular set-piece policy speech by British chancellors of the exchequer, the latest of whom is Jeremy Hunt.

  • Hunt Jeremy Mansion Hse
    Analysis

    UK pension industry reacts to government’s ambitious Mansion House Reform agenda

    October 2023 (Magazine)

    September saw the close of key pension reform consultations. Pamela Kokoszka and Liam Kennedy assess the proposals and some of the responses

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Europe escaped the Great Retirement Boom but watch out for the crunch

    September 2023 (Magazine)

    Continental Europe appears to have largely escaped the trend known in the US as the ‘Great Retirement Boom’, where an economically comfortable cohort of 50 to 64-year-olds has retreated from work in the post-COVID period. 

  • IPE-Top-1000-900x613-05
    Special Report

    Top 1000 Pension Funds 2023: Europe’s pensions absorb a €646bn loss

    Top 1000 Pension Funds 2023

    Last year saw a net reduction in the asset stock of European pension investment retirement pools of 6.77% over the previous year, according to IPE’s annual study of the leading 1,000 pension funds across the continent, marking a sea change for pensions.

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Capital competition: where does it leave sustainability goals?

    July/August 2023 (Magazine)

    For pension funds and other similar large institutional pools of capital, there is significant pressure from politicians to invest in politically favoured domestic sectors – like renewables or high-growth sectors like venture capital. 

  • IPE Top 500 Asset Managers 2023
    Special Report

    IPE Top 500 Asset Managers 2023: Asset management at a pivotal point

    IPE Top 500 Asset Managers 2023

    Data highlights from IPE Top 500 Asset Managers 2023: 2022 global asset management AUM is €102.6trn | 5.5% reduction on the 2022 total of €108.6trn | Global institutional AUM: €35.1trn | European institutional assets: €11.5trn

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Better the equity market devil you know?

    June 2023 (Magazine)

    Being a large equity investor in a relatively small domestic market can have advantages as well as drawbacks. Proximity to the market and its infrastructure, good knowledge of corporates and corporate leaders, and the ability to exercise strong influence as an owner, potentially a stable long-term one, all count among the advantages. The need to avoid concentration – in terms of position, sizing and overall allocations – and idiosyncratic sector exposure are among the challenges. 

  • Rendu de Lint, Christel
    Interviews

    Vontobel: Builders in a changing landscape

    June 2023 (Magazine)

    Christel Rendu de Lint, a veteran of Swiss asset and wealth management, sees herself as a builder. This claim has justification given her track record at UBP, where she built a fixed-income capability from scratch to CHF20bn (€20.5bn) over 12 years.

  • Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, London
    News

    New PPF proposals would represent ‘seismic changes’ to UK pensions landscape

    2023-05-26T14:42:00

    Plans would mean ‘struggling’ DB schemes could choose to opt-in to the Pension Protection Fund

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    LDI lessons: be wary of future traps

    May 2023 (Magazine)

    After the global financial crisis of 2008-09, world leaders meeting at the Pittsburgh G20 summit mandated central clearing for derivatives. This was to allow for greater supervisory oversight and to mitigate against the unintended build-up of risks of the kind that almost toppled the financial system in the guise of over-the-counter credit default swaps.

  • Liam Kennnedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Banking crisis delivers a lesson on equity strategy

    April 2023 (Magazine)

    We may never know the precise reasons why the in-house equity team of Alecta, the €105bn Swedish pension scheme, chose to invest in excess of €1bn in risky US banks including Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), much of which has now been written off. 

  • liam kennedy
    Opinion Pieces

    Might Ukraine’s distressed assets one day look attractive to pension funds?

    March 2023 (Magazine)

    Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 has tested Europe’s political and economic resolve. But where Vladimir Putin attempted to sow discord, he instead has failed to divide the West.

  • Frankfurt, Germany
    Country Report

    Country Report – Pensions in Germany (March 2023)

    March 2023 (Magazine)

    Angela Merkel’s governments largely dodged the political hot potato of first-pillar pension reform, which means the current overhaul to the state system is overdue. But it barely gets to grips with the issues. For one, it does not deal with entitlements or increase the retirement age; second it introduces a funded component that will probably only take effect in the 2030s, when the post-war demographic peak is passing. 

  • biodiversity
    Special Report

    Special Report – Natural capital

    March 2023 (Magazine)

    Incorporating nature risk into financial analysis remains the - for now elusive - goal for investors, but this is hard given the lack of consensus on what information should be collected and how it should be presented. Such questions are the domain of the Taskforce for Nature-related Financial Disclosures (TNFD), the group founded in 2021. As well as striving for transparency and consistency in data disclosure, asset owners are also keen to deter inflated and exaggerated claims by asset managers on biodiversity impacts.

More by Liam Kennedy