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(Pictured: Sonja Lee) Sonja Lee, Towers Watson’s marketing director in Australia, is to join the consulting firm’s prestigious ‘Thinking Ahead Group’ (TAG2.0), based in the UK, from early July. In her new role, Lee will also be revisiting the skills she needed in her previous occupation in management consulting. She has been at Towers Watson for…

(Pictured: Daniel Celeghin) The retail fund and private banking markets will overtake pension and sovereign wealth funds in importance for fund managers in the Asia Pacific region in the next five years, according to a white paper by Casey Quirk. SWFs and other government entities have controlled the bulk of professionally managed assets to date…

(Pictured: Suzanne Holden) Suzanne Holden, chief operating officer of the Link Group, didn’t mince her words at last Friday’s (May 9) AIST superannuation administration symposium. She said up-front costs associated with SuperStream have blown out and estimates of longer-term savings of $1 billion a year were “fanciful”. She was speaking on a panel session with the…

(Pictured: Philip Metcalf) Socius Technologies, a UK-based investment technology start-up, which has opened a regional office in Hong Kong, has developed a form of protected pensions service for super funds which uses portfolio insurance strategies. It appears to be a more palatable alternative for members who have so far been reluctant to give up most or…

(Pictured: Robert Caporale) Milestone Group is expanding its North American presence and has hired an experienced securities services executive, Robert Caporale, from JP Morgan to head up the operation, based in Boston. Caporale has spent the past 12 years at JP Morgan in strategy business and sales roles, most recently as head of sales for the…

(Pictured: Kenneth McAtamney) Kenneth McAtamney thinks that recent trends in investing appear to be veering away from old-fashioned fundamental beliefs and something important is being lost in the process. “What if we just invest in great companies?” he asks. McAtamney, a partner in and portfolio manager for global manager William Blair & Co, says “better” companies…

Andrew Lill… ‘the core of our process is really dynamic asset allocation’ We talk a lot about culture in the funds management industry. Apart from money, it’s what attracts people to work at an organization, be it a funds management firm, a super fund, dealer group or asset consultant. For Andrew Lill, the newish chief…

(Pictured: Andrew Fairley (left) and David Miles) by Greg Bright SMSFs do not represent the threat to APRA-regulated super funds that many have thought, according to two fund chairs who happen also to be experienced lawyers. But perhaps APRA itself may be a threat. In a frank and entertaining final session at last Thursday’s Fund…

(Pictured: Jonathan Green) What’s new about the insourcing discussion, according to Lounarda David, head of investment operations at Sunsuper, is the pace at which it is going on. She warned that doing an assessment of benefits was relatively easy, but getting out if it doesn’t work might be very costly. The session on insourcing at the…

(Pictured: Giselle Awad) eSecLending, the world’s largest non-bank-aligned securities lending firm, has closed its Australian office and is expected to revert to servicing the APAC region from Boston and London. Giselle Awad, a former trader at RBC in Australia, the US and UK, had been the Australasian representative for eSecLending for the past five years, based…