Asset Allocation – Page 158
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Features
Alchemy to the rescue?
Portable alpha offers pension funds the investment equivalent of alchemy – transmuting non-performing into performing assets. Using swaps or futures contracts - a process known as equitisation - funds can transfer or ‘port’ the alpha generated by one asset class to other asset classes in their portfolio. In this way, ...
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The challenges lying ahead
Hugo Clemeur of the Association of Belgian Pension Funds, Brussels Apart from the preoccupations caused generally by the demographic evolution compounded with slow economic growth, the second pillar pensions sector in Belgium faces a number of challenges of which I would mention only three, although many more could be mentioned ...
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How pension funds are addressing biometric risk
Pension funds are dealing with biometric risks in a number of different ways. A few of them explain their particular approaches . ABP, Netherlands “We fund our benefits 100% by ourselves. We are large enough to bear the risks,” says Alexander Paulis, chief actuary at the largest pension fund ...
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Active route away from the crowd
The London Pensions Fund Authority, (LPFA), is one of the UK’s leading public sector pension schemes, with 73,000 members and £3.2bn (€4.7bn) in pension fund assets. It was set up in 1989 as a stand-alone public body to take over the running of the pension fund of the Greater London ...
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Activity across a broad front
In two years’ time the status of Belgium’s self-employed as the poor relations of state pension provision should be a thing of the past. This is one of a number of challenging projects that have been exercising the powers that be in Belgium. The idea was that the self employed ...
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Start of the pooling plunge?
Several years of work have gone into Unilever’s giant asset pooling vehicle. After a long period of decision-making, logistics and negotiation, the €5bn multi-fund vehicle, named Univest, was finally launched at the end of last year. The multinational consumer products group set up Univest to provide a central investment pool ...
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Why pension pooling is a reality
As a panelist at a recent IPE conference, I was asked: “For all the talk about cross-border pension pooling, is anyone actually doing it?” A fair question, because so much pooling-related activity in recent years has gone on behind the scenes. The design and implementation of a first generation of ...
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A question of mindset?
As a junior actuarial student in 1991, I recall watching a role-play of an actuary and a lawyer in court. The lawyer was cross-examining the actuary, focusing on the fact that the actuary was advising both the trustees and the employer, without apparently drawing any distinction between the two. Fifteen ...
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Risk now the magic word
Erik van Ballegooijen resigned as the director of the pension fund of TNO technical research institute in Delft, Netherlands, at the beginning of this year What was your first full-time job – and do you remember what you were paid at the time? My first job was as a ...
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Pensions the Hibernian way
The Irish pension system was very often thrown alongside the UK system for general discussion purposes and was considered as a mirror image of the UK system 10 years ago. How very wrong that image would be today. Like the Irish economy, the Irish pensions system has had to evolve, ...
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Limits to help technology can provide
Unsurprisingly, software developers say they can help, and many pension funds are turning to technology providers. The Ilmarinen Mutual Pension Insurance Company in Finland, for example, has implemented a risk budgeting application from New York based provider RiskMetrics. Ilmarinen is using RiskMetric’s application on an application service provider basis. RiskMetrics ...
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Progress means growing pains
In Hungary the average state pension stands at around HUF57,000 (E229) per month, and only around 10% of the population have state pension of more than HUF100,000. Not surprisingly, during the 1990s, as inflation took hold and raced ahead of state pensions Hungarians started to realise that they would have ...
