News

With new representation for Australia and New Zealand, launched last week, Amundi Asset Management, Europe’s largest funds management firm, has shone a light on three key areas of its broad-based global offering: US-denominated asset classes, ESG strategies and passive management. While the manager, which has about EU1.45 trillion (A$2.31 trillion) under management, has doubled its…

Andrew Formica, Australian boy made good – very good – in London, has had little time off between big jobs. The former chief executive of Henderson Group (HHG Plc) and co-chief of Janus Henderson Group, will become chief executive of troubled Jupiter Fund Management in March. Jupiter, a predominantly retail house, has been suffering substantial…

It’s the US versus the rest of the world in institutional investment management, new research from Fidelity Investments has found. The US is not as keen as almost all other countries on new technologies, new asset classes and socially responsible investing. The recently-published 11th annual Fidelity Institutional Asset Management global fund manager survey reveals a large…

Almost since indices were invented, primarily as a form of measurement, their power to influence the behaviour of market participants and therefore the whole market as defined by those indices has been well understood and sometimes criticised, particularly plain vanilla market-cap indices. But in the past five years this power has considerably weakened, according to…

Led by Gillian Broadbent, former Bankers Trust executive, busy non-executive director and Reserve Bank alumnus, the financial services industry once again contributed several high-powered figures to the Australia Day honours list. Broadbent received the highest honour of the group, Companion of the Order of Australia, an AC. She was already an Officer in the General…

Jeremy Grantham, 80, is all over the science of studying climate change and he doesn’t like what he sees. But, true to his famous fund manager roots, he is able to look at the investment implications and opportunities, while throwing some barbs at ostrich-like policy makers along the way. In a rare webinar for Australian…

by Greg Bright The proposed best-of-breed 10-manager panel to choose default funds plus forced amalgamation of funds which have underperformed for a period grabbed the headlines following the Productivity Commission’s final report on superannuation. For some practitioners this masks a missed opportunity. In 2011, when Bill Shorten, as minister for Financial Services and Superannuation, enacted…

The new global multi-affiliate manager which plans to target Australia and New Zealand this year, both to seek super fund mandates for its existing suite of underlying managers and to look for new managers in which to take minority shareholdings, is also on the lookout for a local distribution partner. iM Global Partner, which was…

Amundi Asset Management, the largest asset manager in Europe, which has had a long presence in Australia through various guises, has appointed Shed Enterprises, a Sydney-based third-party marketing firm, as its Australian and New Zealand representative. Paris-based Amundi was founded in 2010 to run the asset management businesses of Credit Agricole and Societe Generale. It…

State Street announced in Boston last Friday, January 18, that it would be letting go about 1,500 staff – 6 per cent of its workforce – at its various offices, particularly in “high cost regions”, and losing 15 per cent of senior manager positions in a US$350 million program to cut costs. State Street’s assets…

It’s tough for investment professionals to live and work in Port Moresby. Sometimes, the unique culture of the underprivileged nation can go against the grain and local politics can interfere with what we consider best practice. David Brown has just been through such an experience. New Zealand-born Brown is a well-known and respected Australian fund…

Retirement products and strategies have proliferated in recent years, targeting everyone from big super funds, their members through investment options, wholesale investors through planners and retail investors through their SMSFs. They come in all shapes and sizes, though, and some key differences deserve examination. Pentalpha Investment Management, one of the new players in the space,…