News

Australian fund managers have historically viewed New Zealand as an easy-sell; just another state to be serviced by fly-in, fly-out (FIFO) BDMs. But the Kiwis can be a prickly lot. They frequently prefer to deal with offshore managers who commit some boots on the ground or at least those that attempt to meet the locals…

You’d have to say the global private equity market is going gangbusters. Whether or not that’s good for investors is a different question, of course. But when a fund administrator, such as Mainstream Fund Services, has its say, it tends to provide an extra degree of authenticity to the discussion. At the latest in its…

After what has been the most anticipated company reporting season for several years, the verdict is that the market has been a bit too pessimistic. The results are, by and large, not too bad. More ASX-listed companies reported results beat broker consensus forecasts for sales than didn’t, and while there have been more misses for…

by David Chaplin The name remains the same: AMP NZ gets to keep its brand after its Australian parent abandoned a well-flagged IPO last week. And Commonwealth Bank similarly shelved its IPO plan. Q: Who wants to buy an institutionally owned financial planning business? A: no-one. For AMP, the surprise rebranding of the NZ wealth…

State Street and its recently acquired systems and data subsidiary, Charles River Development, have entered into a co-operative arrangement with the risk management specialist and research firm Axioma, whereby the three will integrate their analytics, allowing them, collectively, to cover most or all front, middle and backoffice tasks. The deal is seen, potentially at least,…

Future IM/Pact, an industry-supported group which looks to increase gender and other aspects of diversity within funds management, has signed two new partners ahead of its first major student networking events for 2019, which are happening in Sydney and Melbourne this week. The two new supporters are Challenger and Macquarie Securities which have joined the…

Crypto-currency assets will never catch on with institutional investors until post-trade standards match those of traditional financial markets, a new report claims. The report, by DTCC, outlines the problems crypto currencies are having to gain traction with big investors. In a new white paper, the plethora of platforms trading the so-called crypto assets or “security…

by Greg Bright It took a while to arrange an interview with Garry Weaven. For a recent retiree he remains very busy, mostly still with super industry business. One suspects that his retirement, like most of his life, will be very different from the norm. He turned 70 last November and says it doesn’t get…

The best-performing asset class for the $35 billion Hostplus industry fund last year was private equity, Peter Collins, a trustee director, told a delighted audience of, mainly, private equity managers at the newly named Australian Investment Council dinner in Sydney last week. There was a record attendance of nearly 500 at the dinner, held in…

The Link Group has merged its ‘operations’ and ‘technology and innovation’ teams and brought the operations units of both its corporate markets – the share registry business – and fund administration divisions together under Paul Gardiner. Gardiner’s new title will be chief operations, technology and innovation officer, according to an internal memo sent to Link…

Everyone loves a good IPO story. Exopharm, up 175 per cent in the year of listing, last year, and Adriatic Metals, up 188 per cent. Then there was Ardea Resources the year before, up 850 per cent in the year of listing. But such sensational examples mask the real story across the IPO market. According…

 by Wes Hall and Tristan Laszok* Australia’s super system is heralded as one of the world’s most successful retirement income systems, but scratch the surface and things look different. The industry is suffering from underinvestment in administration and communications infrastructure, risk and compliance. If the large incumbents hope to continue managing Australia’s retirement savings, they…