GERMANY- Klaus Kirschenhofer has joined Siemens’ corporate finance treasury in Munich after over seven years with Wacker-Chemie as a pensions investment manager and member of the board.

He joins with responsibility for asset management and will be working with Peter Scherkamp, head of finance strategies, and will taking on some of his areas of activity. “He will be in charge of asset management issues group-wide and not just pensions,” says Scherkamp.

But his role will involve the closer co-ordination of the pensions assets of the group worldwide. This will include all aspects of the outsourced investment management, which will require working with Siemens Financial Services, which handles the assets of the group’s local pensions through SKAG, the in-house group investment bank operation.

Scherkamp says that Kirschenhofer will be responsible for groupwide coordination of manager selection, performance measurement and monitoring, custody and asset liability management studies.

Kirschenhofer says he will be working closely with Pensions Advisory, the in-group pensions consultancy arm. “This has developed its own ALM service which is highly respected also with external clients.”

As from the end of the group’s financial year in September pensions funds will be reporting their performance data according to a Siemens-wide platform. “This will enable performance and other information to be compared on the same basis,” says Scherkamp.

“These will be online reports which will just have one-day’s delay in the information.” So should another September 11 occur, the group’s financial director can have an up-to-date statement of the asset situation, down to a stock-specific level.

At Wacker-Chemie in Munich, Frederich Leonhardt, chairman of the board of Pensionskasse, says a replacement is being sought for Kirschenhofer, whom he hopes will be in place before the end of summer.


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