The agenda at the United Kingdom’s National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) annual shindig in Liverpool’s Echo Arena on the banks of the Mersey couldn’t have been broader. From early analysis of auto-enrolment, the biggest shake-up of the industry in a generation and just days old, to life expectancy, Britain’s role in the European Union,
The European Union is threatening to drive pension funds out of real estate investments, experts warn. That could be one of the undesirable results of plans to put pension funds under new risk regulations akin to the Solvency II requirements for the continent’s insurers. What most concerns John Forbes, a PriceWaterhouseCoopers real estate expert, is
The world’s largest asset managers should be using the advantages of their size and scalability to adjust their fee structures, according to Craig Baker, the global head of manager research at Towers Watson, which just released this year’s Pensions & Investments/Towers Watson World 500. “The advantage of large managers is [that] they could structure their
The 300 Club is a rare group that combines long-term thinking and asset management provision. Taking on an industry that is evolving from client-driven to product-driven, the 300 Club is proposing a fundamental mindset shift from short-term salesmanship to long-term stewardship. In this paper, chief investment officer of Kempen Capital Management in the Netherlands, Lars
Delegation is a fundamental obstacle to the alignment of asset-owner and asset-manager goals. However, Sebastien Pouget, professor of finance at the University of Toulouse, believes a combination of customised performance benchmarks and a dual short and long-term fee incentive can help overcome the problems of the principal/agent relationship. Pouget, who spoke at the recent United
Denmark has blitzed the pension-system competition, being awarded the first Mercer Global Pension Index A grading. In the process, it has relegated the Dutch and Australian systems to second and third places, respectively, after four years. Mercer senior partner and report author, David Knox, says the reasons for awarding Denmark the top grade were clear.
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