Nearly every Australian has super, but its settings don’t work for every Australian, according to the First Nations Foundation, which is advocating for changes around estate planning and the preservation age to make the system fairer.
Betting against acts of God is a great way to make money, but institutional allocations to natural catastrophe reinsurance have stayed relatively static even as some managers are generating double-digit uncorrelated returns.
Northern Trust on a roll with Aussie Post win
(Pictured: Dennis Sams)
Australia Post’s $6 billion super fund has become the fourth in a series of securities servicing contract wins for Northern Trust this year – all involving JP Morgan as the incumbent provider. And in an unrelated move, the fund has made its head of investments redundant.
The change of custodian follows a review by independent consultant Brett Elvish of Financial Viewpoint. It is understood the short list considered consisted of JP Morgan, State Street and Northern Trust. In a topsy-turvy year for JP Morgan, the firm picked by Cbus from NAB.
Northern’s other recent wins were the $14.8 billion investment portfolio of Insurance Australia Group (IAG), ACT Treasury and Energy Industries Superannuation Scheme.
Rohan Singh, the Northern Trust Australia head, declined to comment on the Australia Post mandate.
Meanwhile, the fund, which is closed to new members and is in run-off mode, has made its head of investments, Dennis Sams, redundant. Sams joined in December 2011, after previously overseeing a $20 billion public markets portfolio for UniSuper. Before that he was head of research at Russell Investments and before that a senior consultant at what was then Towers Perrin. The head of investments role was created for Sams with the promotion of Stephen Milburne-Pyle to chief executive.
