All articles by Liam Kennedy – Page 19
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Features
Straitened times, new measures
This year’s IPE Top 400 Asset Managers survey charts a flatlining global asset management industry with total AUM of €36.3trn at end-2011, a whisker up from the previous year’s total of €36.2trn. And despite striking a rare note of optimism in this month’s magazine as we report projections for the Turkish pension market to grow to €100bn in 10 years, the outlook is also gloomy for Europe’s pension markets. European institutional assets were down 3.5% in 2011, according to our survey.
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NewsThe difficulty of building an efficient pensions system
Sometimes it takes a downturn to tackle inefficiencies that go unnoticed when times are good.
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Features
Efficiency drive
A television documentary series in the UK is currently transporting British viewers back to the 1970s, an era remembered for the oil crisis but also for government energy efficiency campaigns.
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NewsPensionsfonds, 10 years on
Germany's investment set-up is as infuriatingly complex to outsiders as the country's fiscal system.
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Features
Pensionsfonds, 10 years on
It is said that more tax literature exists in German than in any other language. This may be true, but Germany’s institutional investment set-up, as well as its five occupational pensions ‘vehicles’, seems almost as infuriatingly complex to the outsider as the country’s fiscal system.
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Special Report
Europe's Pension Consultants: Firmly in the advisory camp
Chris Ford tells Liam Kennedy why Towers Watson isn’t about to pitch itself as a fiduciary manager
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Interviews
On an ambitious journey
The name ‘AXA’ was chosen in the early 1980s, so the story goes, because it can be easily and uniformly pronounced in any language, and, as far as anyone knows, it also doesn’t mean anything rude anywhere around the world. But slick branding can’t make you good at everything, of course.
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Features
Alphabet soup
The UK’s pensions minister, Steve Webb, is brave to try to keep alive the concept of pensions risk sharing. At the annual chairman’s dinner of the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) in February, he advocated what he termed ‘defined aspiration’ or ‘DA’ pensions to add to the already familiar DB and DC.
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Features
Leader of the supertanker
ABP transformed itself in 2008 when it spun off APG to become an independent pension asset manager that could also manage assets for external pension funds.
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Features
Change without regret
Liam Kennedy spoke with Angelien Kemna, chief investment officer of APG, the Netherlands’ largest pension asset manager with AUM of €278bn, about her policies of ‘minimum regret’ and ‘controlled simplification’
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News
EFRP rejects notion of 'harmonising' European DB pensions systems
Timetable for ‘holistic balance sheet’ impact study ‘inadequate’, says Towers Watson.
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News
EIOPA unveils timetable for 'holistic balance sheet' impact studies
Authority plans decision just six weeks after receiving 3,000 pages of submissions from 170 bodies.
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Features
‘Democracy will be threatened if you lose grip on public finances’
Former Swedish prime minister Göran Persson recalled the night in 1997 when the EU’s Stability and Growth pact was negotiated. His cabinet had already made the decision that Sweden would not join. “We had decided we were not mature enough to join this club, so we would wait. But even then, we were in much better shape than many of those who took it as a given that they should join the euro-zone.”
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News
Towers Watson establishes separate fiduciary management team, appoints CIO
Chris Mansi, chair of the consultancy’s UK portfolio construction group, named CIO.
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NewsWhat the revised IORP Directive should focus on
The original Directive was inadvisable for a number of reasons, says Liam Kennedy.
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Features
Focus on DC
It is difficult to retain sight of the founding principles of the EU’s Pensions Directive (IORP) when confronted with the 500-page response of the European Insurance and Occupational Pensions Authority (EIOPA) to the EC’s call for advice last April on its review of the legislation.
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NewsIn praise of long-termism
Liam Kennedy encourages the newly launched 300 Club to champion the long-term view.
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Features
The long-termists
As those who watched the 2006 film ‘300’ will remember, ‘the 300’ refers to the band of Spartans who heroically fought against the Persians at the battle of Thermopylae in 480BC. A modern re-incarnation – The 300 Club – has been brought to life by Saker Nusseibeh, CIO of Hermes ...
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Features
Search for advantage in a crowded market
Why launch an emerging market debt (EMD) strategy when there are already 40-plus institutional competitors in the market? First State Investments – which has just hired Helene Williamson from F&C Asset Management along with Jan-Markus May, Manuel Cañas and Philip Fielding to run the strategy – did not make the decision for short-term reasons, according to Gary Withers, the firm’s EMEA managing director.
