News

Tasplan, the $8 billion Tasmanian-based industry fund, has become one of the first to review its insurances ahead of the proposed “Protecting Your Super” legislation. There are winners and losers in this situation. Nick Connor, the Tasplan chief operations officer, says that his fund’s review actually started because of the recent mergers, ahead of the…

SuperRatings and Lonsec have announced the finalists for their upcoming awards night, to be held at Melbourne’s Grand Hyatt on October 30. The awards reflect the evolution of the super industry, with several new accolades for innovation and technological developments. Lonsec Holdings, the company which oversees SuperRatings and Lonsec Research, is hosting the annual awards…

RBC Investor & Treasury Services has won the core custody, fund administration, registry and risk and investment analytic services for multi-manager Warakirri Asset Management. Warakirri’s previous custodian was JP Morgan. Warakirri offers specialist investment management for charities, global and domestic pension funds as well as individual investors across Australian and international equities, Australian agriculture, currency…

by John Hamer* Paul Smith, the global president and chief executive of the CFA Institute, says shining a light on a problem, as Australia’s Royal Commission into banking has done, is a good thing. Before you find a cure you need to find the illness, he says. Australian cricket’s ball-tampering’ scandal is a good analogy….

by John Peterson* S&P Dow Jones Indices recently released their SPIVA Australian Scorecard covering manager versus index performance to June 2018. The results of the analysis, unsurprisingly, found that, with the exception of small-cap equities, the average Australian actively managed fund underperformed comparable market indices over one-year and longer periods. That is, more than 50…

Lars Jaeger, the global head of risk premia investing for GAM Investments, has looked at the work behind the latest Nobel prizes for economics – one for studies in technological innovation and one for climate change. His conclusion is that economies grow best in “open societies”. In his latest personal blog Jaeger, the head of…

In the country’s biggest single investment mandate, State Street Global Advisors ended the financial year with almost NZ$8 billion (A$7.6 billion) under management for the NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS). The just-released NZS annual accounts show the State Street passive global equities mandate sat just $24 million shy of the $8 billion mark as at June…

by Greg Bright Two conflicting trends are emerging in investment management which contrast fundamental top-down research with quantitative data sourcing, analysis and management. Forget the index versus active debate, it’s looking more like politics versus big data and artificial intelligence. Quantitative analysis could be at an interesting point of its evolution. On the one hand,…

The Australian Custodial Services Association, one of only two industry bodies which can genuinely be considered to be apolitical, has embarked on a new growth path, having appointed its first chief executive for many years and drawn up a clear program of study and member engagement. Given the Royal Commission, there is no better time…

Technology may well make the distribution channels of the past, such as IFAs and other intermediaries, a thing of the past. As big fund managers have tried for many years, going direct to the retail investor is becoming increasingly viable, according to an award-winning white paper by tech services company Calastone. The paper, ‘The Digital…

Up to five private equity firms are vying for a two-thirds stake in New Zealand-domiciled investment platform business FNZ. FNZ, through a joint venture with UBS Australia, provides backoffice services for several big super fund member-directed investment options, including that of AustralianSuper, which was the first to market here. The ‘New Model Adviser’ website based…

Conference producer and specialist publisher Conexus Financial plans to launch an ‘institute’ to study retirement incomes products and strategies. The firm has advertised for someone to lead the new body, to be funded by the privately owned firm and its chief executive, Colin Tate. The job advertisement, on Seek.com, says the Conexus Institute is a…