All Guest Viewpoint articles – Page 13
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Bernhard Wiesner - Bosch Group
Does the new IORP II Directive reflect the needs of sponsoring companies and their IORPs in Europe?
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: Con Keating - BrightonRock Group
With 78% of pension funds considering themselves long-term investors in an IPE Focus Group survey, it would be tempting to believe that dramatic progress had been made towards achieving the objectives of the Kay Review on UK equity markets.
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Opinion Pieces
Research: Ageing demographics are an asset allocation game changer
Two of the four worst bear markets of the last century rocked the world of investing over just seven years in the last decade. They sidelined conventional wisdom on risk premia and diversification.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest Viewpoint: “Asset owners and managers need to address the problems in the investment industry and focus on value for the ultimate beneficiaries”
We need to move on from today’s investment world, which essentially has been built by intermediaries for intermediaries. Their purposes have become too narrow and too self-centred to be of sustainable value to asset owners, who are charged with transporting and growing savings across time – affordably, securely and fairly.
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Opinion Pieces
Guest viewpoint: “Macro matters. We ignore it at our peril”
Open a newspaper. Any newspaper. Read the front page and then the business pages. Absorb, assimilate, repeat. After half a dozen goes, you may notice a pattern.
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Opinion Pieces
“Governance can serve as a stimulus to improve and nurture pension organisations”
Once a year, the US professional basketball league organises its all-star competition. Players from teams across the country are selected as the best in their respective positions. Could we have an all-star pension industry, uniting the best standards and practices under one roof?
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Opinion Pieces
“The best CDC design is collective implementation with clear ownership rights”
Designing a robust retirement income solution is not easy – as with most complex issues, there are no silver bullets, only trade-offs. The challenge is to balance life-long retirement income stability with financial risk-taking, all within a framework that is understandable, transparent and fair and hence can be trusted by members.
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Opinion Pieces
“Italian employees have great need of consistent additional pension coverage”
Assets managed by pension funds in Italy equate to about 6% of its gross domestic product. In a country where the social security system provides an adequate level of coverage at retirement that would not be a concern. But in Italy, after all the recent reforms, this situation represents a relevant risk for both employees and employers. Benefits provided by the social security system have strongly decreased over the last 20 years and the retirement age raised considerably.
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Opinion Pieces
Bart Heenk, Managing director, Avida International
“A balanced scorecard enables trustees to monitor, assess and improve outsourced services”
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Opinion Pieces
Nigel Waterson, Chairman of trustees, Now Pensions
“There is one universal truth upon which virtually everyone agrees – the UK annuities market is broken”
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Opinion Pieces
Thomas Richter CEO BVI, Germany’s asset management association
“Auto enrolment would make sense in Germany and could develop through collective bargaining”
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Opinion Pieces
Debbie Harrison Visiting professor The Pensions Institute, Cass Business School, UK
“The most important factor that determines the outcome in DC pensions is the member charge, not the investment strategy”
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Opinion Pieces
Jerry Moriaty, CEO and Director of Policy at the Irish Association of Pension Funds
“While Ireland begins to show signs of economic improvement, it is clear there are still a lot of unresolved issues in the pensions sector”
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Opinion Pieces
Nitin Mehta, CFA Managing director, EMEA, CFA Institute
“Over recent decades, secular shifts in values have resulted in too much emphasis on profits and not enough on professionalism”
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Opinion Pieces
Matthew Kiernan, Inflection Point Capital Man. & Paul Clements-Hunt, The Blended Capital Group:“Investors who fail to develop systematically aware investment processes risk commercial extinction”
There is no shortage of high-wattage brainpower directed to the promotion of longer-term finance and investing.
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Opinion Pieces
Elizabeth Corley: “Drawing on behavioural science, we should be thinking more holistically about income lifecycles”
For everyone managing pension funds, or their investments, or indeed managing our own retirement planning, one of the greatest challenges is to maintain a focus on achieving long-term strategic goals amid the constant buffeting of contradictory news and the distraction of more pressing concerns.
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Opinion Pieces
Per Linnemann - Independent consulting actuary
“Smoothed income annuities could revive the pension fund industry”
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Opinion Pieces
Paul Schott Stevens, president and CEO, Investment Company Institute
“Global funds have more work to do as part of this retirement savings evolution”
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Opinion Pieces
Alexander Ineichen, Founder of Ineichen Research and Management
“Confusing uncertainty with volatility or VaR is like mistaking a tiger for a pussycat. It’s irresponsible and dangerous”
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Opinion Pieces
Peter Borgdorff, CEO, PFZW
“When I think of the destination of this money, I think of the woman who cycles from house to house and cleans someone’s bottom”