All articles by Liam Kennedy – Page 17
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Special Report
Top 1000 Pension Funds: The thrifty thousands
Roger Urwin, global head of investment content at Towers Watson, noted earlier this year that the world’s leading investors are upping their internal resources and adopting the organisational characteristics of asset managers. Urwin’s focus was on what he calls the ‘Thrifty Fifty’ largest institutional asset pools. Our reference to ‘Thrifty Thousands’ on the cover of this year’s Top 1000 supplement owes a debt to Urwin’s coinage.
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Special Report
Investment Solutions: Very real problems
Complexity in regulation, heightened demand for efficient liability management, market volatility and the sheer breadth of investment opportunities have created demand for a different type of relationship between asset managers and pension funds, writes Liam Kennedy. How are they meeting this demand? And, with a new generation of ‘modular’ or ...
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Features
Smarter outsourcing
The term ‘outsourcing’ first came to light in 1979, and gained popularity in business by the 1990s as companies sought supply-chain efficiency and to concentrate on their core activity. The notion also gained currency in pension fund management.
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Features
Unsubtle financial repression
Dutch politicians are acutely aware of the size and importance of pension funds and want pension assets to be channelled back into the domestic economy.
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Features
Transition management for China
European politicians like to meet with Jin Liqun, chairman of the board of supervisors of China Investment Corporation. As a man with more than $400bn (€309.2bn) in assets for investment outside China, they have been actively courting his fund’s capital.
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Special Report
Top 400 Asset Managers: Global assets back on the rise
Total AUM of top 400 managers = €39.2trn (2012 = €36.3trn; 2011 = €36.2trn). Increase in AUM of 8% over 2012. BlackRock is the largest manager (€2.9trn) and accounts for 7.4% of overall assets. Top 100 managers account for 83.7% of the assets (€32.8trn).
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Features
Inflexion point
Finance directors, policy makers and academics already regret the period – right up until the 1990s – in which corporations and governments made what now seem extravagant pension promises to baby boomers.
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Features
All eyes on auto-enrolment
Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats may be consistently ahead in the polls and occupational pensions are not likely to play any role at all in the forthcoming German parliamentary elections. Yet as we report in this issue, there is a flutter of interest in auto-enrolment into workplace pensions on the part ...
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Features
Cross-border lessons
The 2010 comedy film Rien à Déclarer focused on the rivalry between a pair of customs officers either side of the pre-Schengen Franco-Belgian frontier.
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Features
Ireland’s challenge
Ireland’s presidency of the European Council is an opportunity for the country to showcase the progress it has made in repairing its finances and its economy since the bailout at the end of 2010.
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Features
Mark-to-market blues
Lucy Prebble’s musical Enron, about the troubled energy company of the same name, famously features a song routine on mark-to-market accounting. Marking pension liabilities to market is a complex issue, fraught not only with market and technical considerations but now, increasingly, with political ones.
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Features
No panacea
The coming weeks are scheduled to see the publication of the European Commission’s Green Paper on long-term investing, announced by the single market commissioner Michel Barnier earlier this year.
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Interviews
Boutique ambition
Natixis Asset Management (NAM) might be less well known than other firms in the Natixis Global Asset Management (NGAM) empire, such as Boston’s Loomis Sayles or Chicago’s Harris Associates. But the Paris firm is by far the largest asset manager in its parent’s multi-affiliate structure in asset terms, in part thanks to its historic ties with France’s Caisse d’Epargne and Banque Populaire network, and its strong local roots.
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Features
Fighting talk
Pension funds see remuneration from two different but uniquely intertwined perspectives. As institutional investors, they are under increasing pressure to hold companies, including banks, to account over executive pay.
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Features
Shock factor
Liam Kennedy spoke with Theo Kocken and Kerrin Rosenberg about pensions, behavioural finance and a new definition of fairness
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Features
Soft and hard factors
Daily, at thousands of pension funds, judgements are formed on asset managers. Those managers may largely be hired and fired on the basis of hard numbers, but relationships are assessed (and sustained through hard times or otherwise curtailed) on the basis of a combination of ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ factors. Tough economic and market conditions increase the importance of those factors. But which ones do pension funds pay closest attention to?
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NewsTomorrow's long-term capitalists
Many of tomorrow's long-term capitalists will not be the same ones as today's.
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Features
The long haul
Speaking a little over 200 days into his tenure as EFRP secretary general, Matti Leppälä was a busy man. His secretariat was working on its response to the quantitative impact study of EIOPA (the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority) on the holistic balance sheet proposal, and he was looking forward to the Brussels close season when the city’s politicians, officials and interest groups head for Europe’s holiday spots.
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Features
Tomorrow’s long-term capitalists
The UK equity market, as Prof John Kay rightly points out in his review ‘UK Markets and Long-term Decision Making’, is no longer majority-owned by UK pension funds and insurers, and has not been for a long time.
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NewsIORP framework could impinge on social partner agreements – EFRP
EUROPE – Brussels could be overstepping mark by imposing its views on 'regulatory certainty' for pensions.
