Active Super and Vision Super are now entering the home stretch of a drawn-out merger process that will create a new $29 billion fund with 170,000 member accounts.
The NZ Superannuation Fund has made half-a-dozen fresh investments over the previous few months across an eclectic range of strategies including US timber, a quant trend-follower and a life science specialist.
Governance, transparency and pension funds
Big pension funds often rail about the governance of the companies they invest in. But what about their own? Benjie Fraser, a governance expert, focuses on Asia Pacific funds compared with European ones at the IO&C Conference in Shanghai, April 29-30.
Fraser, a managing director of JP Morgan Worldwide Securities Services, Europe, says: “The Global pensions are underpinned by a mixture of serious reform and continued policy debate.
“Globally, perhaps, there are two worlds: a world where adequate savings is viewed as mandatory and a world where saving enough is still a matter of coercion.With a rapidly ageing world these two ways of operating a system fit-for-purpose are likely to evolve and increasingly share best practice.
“In the meantime what is clear is that pensions are creating a confluence of interests around structures, governance and trends.”
- Confluence of Trends and Reforms
Fraser says: “The outcome we are already seeing is a move towards far greater transparency in the way the industry runs itself.”
