AustralianSuper has made its first investment in the UK shopping centre market, through its expanding internal investment team and via a co-investment with the BT (British Telecom) Pension Scheme. The deal marks the first property investment by the AustralianSuper inhouse managers. The deal was organized by Hermes Real Estate Investment Management, which sold its investment…
(Pictured: Paul Coenraads) Paul Coenraads, former head of investments at AUSCOAL Super, has taken up a new role running investment operations at Australian Catholic Super in Sydney. He started there this month. AUSCOAL announced last August that it was restructuring its small investment team, with the proposed appointment of its first chief investment officer, who…
NAB Asset Servicing has upped its sales effort with the appointment of long-time NAB executive Peter Hele to the new role of head of business development, Australia/New Zealand. The announcement, last week, signals an increased effort in New Zealand, especially, where BNP Paribas has a dominant position in terms of numbers of clients, and in…
(Pictured: Spiro Paule) Centric Wealth and Financial Index Wealth Accountants will merge, assuming last week’s announced proposed agreed takeover proceeds, to become one of Australia’s largest, and unaligned, advisory groups, speaking for $7.6 billion under advice. This may have implications for the institutional part of the industry too. Financial Index’s (Findex) backer, private equity firm…
Planners will have to offer this advice, one way or another, if they are going to keep their client base. But it’s not for everybody. It’s a touchy feely subject.’ – Anna Lawton The complicated world of aged care is about to get a bit more complicated with this year’s proposed changes to the core…
Comment by Greg Bright It was controversial when APRA announced a few years back that it would be publishing its own performance tables for super funds, using collected data dating back to 2004. Commercial researchers who had been doing this for a while – Rainmaker, SuperRatings and ChantWest – were concerned. They needn’t have been….
Pictured: Chris Ailman UNPRI, which came under fire late last year for its own governance, has strengthened its board with the addition of Chris Ailman, the CIO of America’s second-largest pension fund, CalSTRS. Ailman said in a statement last week that CalSTRS, which has assets of about US$180 billion, had been adopting ESG (environment, social…
Pictured:Â William De Vijlder Multi-affiliate manager BNP Paribas Investment Partners seems reasonably bullish on the major asset classes for 2014, according to its latest annual forecasts. Bond yields will rise but so will equities, including emerging markets. More importantly, flows are likely to return to the emerging markets. And credit, especially illiquid credit, offers new opportunities….
Pictured: James Gruber Back in September last, the annual New York client conference of Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which always attracts some big-name Australian companies and fund managers, included several sessions at which speakers questioned the sustainability of valuations of the big four Australian banks. Hedge fund managers were beginning to short the Aussie…
The first UK license to use Chinese RMB to purchase Chinese stocks from outside of China, known as RQFII (RMB Qualified Foreign Institutional Investor), was granted last week to the London-based Ashmore Group in a much-anticipated deal that also included the appointment of HSBC as custodian for the new investment product. The UK is the…
