This is the last edition of Investor Strategy News for the year. We will next publish on January 10, 2022. Here are some thoughts on the year past, based on reader reactions to our stories. Our most popular for the year was our coverage of the Australian Catholic Superannuation and Retirement Fund’s APRA performance test…
Australia was the brightest spot for big-city property investment among Asia Pacific cities during 2021 and Melbourne showed the most improvement in the world. According to the annual study by Heitman, Chicago-based global real estate manager, of the world’s cities for their attractiveness as real estate markets, Melbourne jumped four places to 14th spot in…
Acacia Money, a fintech start-up which has embraced major consumer and market trends in financial services, this week takes its next big step through the launch of a ‘super solutions’ component of its offering. Armed with data from Chant West and aggregator Yodlee, the savings and wealth management platform launched in August will now incorporate…
Thanks in part to the pandemic, employers have sufficient awareness of mental health problems in the workforce, their human and economic costs. Now is the time for programs to solve them. A multi-country multi-industry webinar last week (December 9) looked at how employers should learn from the impact of covid-19 and put in place processes…
Super Rewards is looking to expand its partnership program with big super funds as a way to help them lift member engagement, particularly among women members. The company, launched by former financial services marketer-turned entrepreneur Pascale Helyar-Moray in 2019, allows cash-back incentives from selected retailers across all household spending from day-to-day shopping through to prescription…
Casey Quirk, the funds management advisory arm of Deloitte, has predicted more M&A activity because of the continued better profits coming from alternative over traditional managers. In a client report last week (December 9) Casey Quirk says alternatives managers, or those primarily focused on private markets, consistently generate higher profit margins than traditional firms, or…
On the first weekend of December, Citi Securities Services went live on the last of 26 former RBC Treasury & Investor Services clients, putting an exclamation point behind one of the biggest and most complex of backoffice transitions. The RBC clients, predominantly fund managers and wealth platforms, are adding about $100 billion in assets under…
Third-party marketer 3PD has joined up with an ESG specialist multi-affiliate and distribution company based in in London, Haven Green. 3PD, which was launched last year by Rob Harrison and Steve Larkin, two experienced funds management marketers, has formed an alliance to represent Haven Green’s managers, which include pure-play ESG specialists, in Australia and New…
Private markets assets are “ripe for the picking” for fund managers and administrators quick to use distributed ledger technology, as investment operations are on the cusp of “great change”. So said David Mackaway, the COO of Challenger Group, at the Calastone ‘Connect Forum’ last week (December 2. He was interviewed by Justin Christopher, Calastone director…
Fund managers are subject to behavioural biases like all of us, such as over-confidence, short-termism and memory distortions. Take their predictive abilities. They are not, on average, especially good. In a unique report for clients, Frontier has published what amounts to a longitudinal study based on eight years of conversations, surveys and other communications with…
