All articles by Liam Kennedy – Page 18
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Features
Time to get together?
In an ideal world, pension fund mergers create advantageous economies of investment and administration scale that benefit members, pensioners and sponsors long term. In the real world, pension funds are complicated to merge, not least because social partners often demand that everyone has a seat around the board table.
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Features
Politics and sovereign wealth
Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global is now the third-largest institutional investor in the world, after Japan’s Government Pension Fund and China’s SAFE
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Interviews
M&G Fixed Income: Shining a light in the cracks
IPE editor Liam Kennedy sits down with M&G chief executive Simon Pilcher
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Features
Actuaries in business
Liam Kennedy asked Jonathan Punter and Stuart Southall about their careers as actuaries, entrepreneurs and dealmakers in the world of UK pensions
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IP Asia
Risk management challenges for pension funds
Complexity in regulation, heightened demand for efficient liability management and market volatility have created demand for a different type of relationship between asset managers and pension funds, writes Liam Kennedy.
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Features
Buyout now while stocks last
Pension longevity transfer, whether through full insurance buyouts, bulk annuities or longevity swaps, is still largely a UK business.
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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.
