A listing of 1,000 of Europe’s top pension funds is a milestone in the development of the marketplace, we believe. It demonstrates once again that the pensions industry in Europe has taken a further step down the road to maturity and the attention it can now command in the European economy. This sends a clear message to politicians, regulators and educators that a new power is developing to which they must give increasing recognition.
For pension funds a greater place in the limelight is not something that most of them seek. The majority of pension professionals would naturally shrink from this as a matter of course.
The centre stage may not be their natural habitat, but inexorably that is where the industry is headed and with that comes greater public scrutiny and curiosity, about the nature, size and operations of the pension fund community. The industry and that means those in it must be prepared for greater publicity, both good and bad.
The consequence will be greater transparency and accountability, requiring an ongoing stream of information emanting from pensions schemes themseleves and the bodies that represent them.
This then is the first step to the definitive list of Europe’s Top 1,000 funds and because of the different stages of the development of pension markets, we have had to present the information in two tables. The first is the Top 750 continental funds and relevant foudations, followed by a second table of the top 250 UK funds. With the different ratios of first to second pillar provision likely to diminish over time, this disparty between the UK and the continental funds will surely close.
The information gathering process set up to produce the directory International Pension Funds and their Advisors, published by Aspire Publications, was the primary source of data for these and for the national market tables in the different country sections. The UK Top 250 Pensions Fund Table was taken from UK Pension Funds and their Advisers, published by AP Informations Services.
We also used information compiled by IPE for a range of surveys and our market asset allocation data came from a variety of sources, the major contributors being Watson Wyatt’s Global Asset Study and William M Mercer’s European Pensions Fund Managers Guide.