All Securities Services articles – Page 18
-
Features
Global players home in
There is an air of eager anticipation among global custodians when it comes to providing services in central and eastern Europe. Interest in the region has been steadily building over the past few years and the accession of countries including Poland, Hungary, Slovakia and the Czech Republic to the EU ...
-
Features
De-risking the pension scheme
In recent years, corporate sponsors of pension schemes have found themselves in a constantly changing environment. Defined benefit pension commitments are now recognised as a major source of financial risk for most global businesses and companies realise that their credit ratings and their ability to finance themselves are likely to ...
-
Features
Why custody is no commodity
What is the real cost or benefit of custody activities and how can you work with your custodian, or perhaps fund managers, to improve the bottom line? Custody activities have been often criticised as opaque. Perhaps the arrangements were only reviewed once every three years or more. Not only was ...
-
Features
The power of the 'case method'
If you felt some tremors on 25 October, the cause may have been the animated debate at the University of Toronto’s Rotman school of management about the right financial policies for the Public Sector Employee Retirement System (PERS). The participants in the debate were the 55 attendees to a colloquium ...
-
Features
Block trading: horses for courses
One component of transition management that has grown in importance is block trading. As its name implies, this involves the trading of large blocks of shares between institutions. Historically, the problem with block trading is that there is no wholesale market for shares. Large institutional investors trade in the same ...
-
Special Report
A question of best practice
For trustees and board members of pension funds in Europe, life has never been harder. A decade ago, things looked rosy. Pension funds were in surplus, and funding levels were not a concern. Pension schemes were posting strong double digit returns, allowing contribution holidays, and spending almost next to no ...
-
Features
Keeping in with the rating agencies
For companies that depend on the bond markets for financing, the importance of their credit rating cannot be overstated. A satisfactory credit rating in this context means at least single A (the lowest ‘investment grade’ rating) but many issuers aim to achieve AA and a few are AAA. The choice ...
-
Features
Managers: can they predict?
IPE’s Investment Manager’s Expectation Indicator displays predictions on different asset classes of approximately 122 asset managers and is published in every issue of IPE. Russell Investment Group, in the data pages each month, summarises the total figures of how many managers are positive, neutral or negative. This summary gives an ...
-
Features
Keyed into technology
Although pension regimes can differ significantly from country across Europe, pension funds share a belief that technology is critical to successfully meeting the challenges that face them today. A common theme across the region is change – new regulations, new behaviour in markets where assets are invested, new competition, and ...
-
Features
Shift to global markets
The global custody and services agreement between Nordea and Bank of New York, announced in August this year, signifies a wider trend in the Nordic region, away from domestic banks and towards the international global custodians. Under the agreement, which covers around €240bn of assets (about half of Nordea’s total ...
-
Features
Innovation gets results
PME Bedrijfstakpensioenfonds Metalektro (PME), which has assets under management of €18bn, attributes its success to a number of clear-cut principles that underpin the organisation and govern the way in which the pension scheme operates. PME has a strong executive board that is responsible for determining basic policy. The task of ...
-
Features
Fishing in a lively pond
For Freud it was ‘id’. For investors, should it be ‘mid’? Yes. Mid caps are under-researched and under-owned, which makes them fertile ground for stockpickers. The availability of information in this area of the market is poor. So there is good potential to benefit from identifying positive change in companies ...
-
Features
Early retirement trend slows
Europe seems to be slowly inching away from its early retirement tendencies, according to the latest data on pensions expenditure issued by Eurostat, the EU’s statistical bureau. The release of this data coincides with the publication of a study by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), which calls ...
-
Features
Hidden costs of trading revealed
Most trustees have no problem in seeing why investment performance must be monitored. The success or failure of the entire fund is at stake. But when it comes to putting transaction costs under the microscope, the exercise can sometimes seem too arcane to bother with. Still, many pension funds are ...
