All Securities Services articles – Page 35
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Features
Coping with fixed liabilities and volatile assets
Pension funds, and particularly defined benefit (DB) ones, are basically a bag of liabilities. These obligations have to be matched by both current assets and the future income stream. In the past 50 years, pension funds have benefited successively from high returns on equities, bonds, and equities again. Since September ...
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Features
Search for safer processes
Although investment managers and pension funds previously largely ignored derivatives, recent events in the market are causing them to look at them again. Futures, options and swaps can provide useful instruments to either gain or hedge exposures to help meet performance targets or to manage risks. But derivatives can be ...
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Features
Finding a place of asset managers
A pervading atmosphere of gloom surrounded Sibos, the annual operations conference of the financial messaging operator Swift, at Geneva in early October. The twin conference themes – resilience and value – did little to stimulate any real debate and the economic downturn had cast a pall over the 250 companies ...
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Features
Time for liability-driven benchmarks
We are all told early on in pensions investment theory that you can’t invest without incurring risk and that, indeed, you have to accept risk to achieve reward. Now, after years of investing in the equity market, apparently without risk, as returns rolled in without having to worry , it ...
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Features
‘Transformation of Pension Systems in Central and Eastern Europe'
This is a book edited and written by social policy academics on the state pensions systems of the “Visegard four” central European states (Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Slovakia) and the three Baltic republics (Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania). It provides a brief overview of their respective social security systems before ...
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Features
Knowing how you're doing
As the markets continue to go through difficult and unsettled times, investors are demanding more reporting on performance and attribution, both in terms of frequency and depth. Funds and asset managers are under pressure to meet international standards of reporting and to make their reports more accessible, including daily, if ...
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Features
Unassailable position
The merger between CRESTCo, the UK depository, and Euroclear has once again thrown the spotlight onto the rationalisation of the clearing and settlement infrastructure for European equity and fixed income transactions. For Euroclear – which had already absorbed the French (Sicovam), Dutch (Necigef) and Belgian (CIK) CSDs – it is ...
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Features
Pension assets go on growing
Pension fund assets in Europe continue to grow in spite of the downturn in global financial markets. IPE’s annual survey of Europe’s leading pension funds shows that the top 1000 funds now account for E2.3trn in assets, up from E2.1trn last year. A total of 47 of the top 100 ...
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Features
Pension assets fall
Assets held by the world’s largest 300 pension funds fell by 12% according to research by consultant Watson Wyatt and Pensions & Investments. Assets of the largest 300 funds totalled $5.43trn (E5.5trn) last year compared with $6.17trn at the end of 2000. The drop is in sharp contrast to growth ...
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Features
Dutch still have hands on assets
Externally managed Dutch institutional assets are still on the rise according to our latest report on the Dutch institutional investment management market-place. Total Dutch external institutional assets managed totalled E309bn at the start of this year. According to the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS), the total amount of Dutch pension ...
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Features
Watsons to publish data
Watson Wyatt is following the lead of rival consultant Mercer Human Resource Consulting with publication next January of data on performance of the managers it recommends. The consultants will publish data on theoretical portfolios, divided along various asset classes and run by those managers recommended. Head of European investment consulting ...
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Features
Reconciling different shareholders' views
There are essentially four major players in the provision of and management of pensions. An understanding of the objectives of each can be very illuminating when considering how they should and how they actually do interact with each other. This ‘Game Theory’ formulation has a clear, explicit macro objective, namely, ...
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Features
Future of industry 'not clear'
With fund management moving out of a period of ‘comfortable consensus’ in asset allocation and portfolio theory, the state of the asset management industry is currently one of ‘shifting tectonic plates’, said David Spina, chairman and CEO of State Street. Addressing the 12th international Fund Forum in Rome, Spina said ...
