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(Pictured: Rohan Singh) Northern Trust has picked up three big new asset servicing clients in Australia in the past few weeks, including, most recently, the $14.8 billion investments portfolio of IAG (Insurance Australia Group). While neither IAG nor Northern’s head of Australian business, Rohan Singh, were able to comment on the mandate last week, they supplied…

(Pictured: Phil Weinberg) We’ve been telling everyone for years but it now turns out that we were right: good execution of securities trading is important. It’s important not only for fund managers but also for super funds who are their clients and, increasingly, their competitors. Phillip Weinberg, the founder of Australia’s first broker-neutral trading firm, has…

(Pictured: John Stopford) There are many changes afoot in investment management and a lot of them are interlinked. The blending of fixed interest and multi-asset strategies is an interesting development, which is prompting pension funds to rethink the way they do asset allocation. After a 35-year bull market, global fixed interest is likely to be a…

Jo Townsend … “REST remains a firm believer in active management” REST Industry Super, one of Australia’s largest super funds, has also been a top performing fund in the SuperRatings analyses for the past several years. Jo Townsend, the fund’s general manager of investments, spoke to the ratings agency for this report. Townsend thinks that…

(Pictured: Ron Bird) As submissions to the Financial System Inquiry are closed off, today, academics attached to the Paul Woolley Centre have questioned the fundamental assumption that a larger financial system is better for GDP than a smaller one. Professor Ron Bird and Dr Jack Gray, both former fund managers, produced a submission to the Inquiry…

(Pictured: Stephen Dunne) By Greg Bright Australian financial services firms have generally not travelled well. Of the banks, NAB lost a lot of money trying to expand in both the UK and US. Westpac never really became the bank of the Western Pacific as Pieter Huveneers* designed the name to be. ANZ has slowly gathered some…

(Pictured: Louise Davidson) By Penny Pryor Cbus is currently working with MSCI to identify the worst performing ESG stocks in the emerging markets index, for a new emerging markets index mandate. Speaking at a session on divestment at the Conference of Major Superannuation Funds last week, Louise Davidson, environmental, social and governance manager at Cbus…

(Pictured: Paul Schroder) AustralianSuper has completed the hiring of a strategy, performance and analytics team within the trustee office to better harvest and integrate the fund’s data sets. Paul Schroder, group executive membership, was excited about the calibre of the team and said its formation was the first step in understanding how the collection and integration…

(Pictured: Sue Wang) While the sell-off in emerging markets last year has prompted renewed interest from value-oriented investors, Mercer Investment Consulting has cautioned that there has been increased dispersion between markets and also, in the case of equities, within markets. In a recent presentation on EMs, Mercer consultants Sue Wang and Simon Calder said the firm…

(Pictured: Daniel Celeghin) Casey Quirk, the US-based advisory and research business for funds management, has opened an office in the region, with partner Daniel Celeghin relocating from New York to Hong Kong last month. Celeghin, who has been a frequent visitor to Australia, along with his fellow partner and Boston-based Ben Phillips, who is well known…