News

(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: Wes Palmer) After 15 years in asset servicing and custody, Wes Palmer has transitioned to broader investment sales and marketing, taking up a position at Mercer as a principal in the financial services division. The Melbourne-based position involves sales for the $17 billion Mercer super trusts, corporate super and administration. Palmer, a former British army…

(Pictured: Michael Delaney) The ghosts of the GFC continue to haunt MTAA Super’s members. The fund is to wind up its ill-fated ‘target return option’ following a review of investment arrangements. This is the option into which the fund had also directed allocations from its ‘growth, ‘balanced’ and ‘conservative’ options under its previous management, prior to…

(Pictured: Anthony Viel) Anthony Viel, a partner at Deloitte, has a challenging suggestion for big super funds: he says that they risk becoming “the back-office function” for someone else who “owns the relationship” with their members. Big, mainly not-for-profit, super funds have a blind spot, he believes, when they look at their competitive landscape. Their real…

(Pictured: Gary Black (l) and John Calamos) One of the legacies of the financial crisis is that many investors are looking to have greater surety of investment outcomes and limit their downside risk. While new products have been built to satisfy this demand, many well-established strategies are also coming to the fore. One of these involves…

(Pictured: Bob van Munster) Bob van Munster, one of the most respected value managers in Australia, will retire from Tyndall Asset Management later this year. He had already transitioned for succession and will sell his shares in the equities part of the business back to Tyndall for future distributions. His successor, from June 1, is Brad…

(Pictured: Kathryn McDonald) AXA Investment Managers, which has a long history of research into and usage of ESG factors for investment, has now developed the integration of these factors into its ‘smart beta’ strategies. The work, explained in a white paper distributed in Australia last week, involves the application of both negative and positive ESG screens…

(Pictured: Paul Chadwick) AIMA Australia has distributed a timely paper on the link between the growth in capital markets and economic growth. It’s timely because of the Murray Inquiry into the Financial System, for which submissions close on March 31. But it’s not universally accepted. AIMA, the global alternative investment management association, says there is…

(Pictured: Graeme Russell) Following the publication last week of a commentary which was critical of Media Super, there has been a lot of discussion in investment circles about the roles of a CIO and other investment professionals at super funds. How important are they? The commentary’s central criticisms were that Media Super should not have made…

By Jerome Lander* Media Super has been highlighted recently in the media as an underperforming fund.  There is no need for Media Super to remain that way.  Frankly, they look like they could do with some help!  One of the main opportunities Media Super has to add value to their members is in fact something…

By Carol Geremia* The importance of a healthy organisational culture is well-known and thoroughly researched. In some senses, it is one of the most well-trodden modern-day management nostrums, trumpeted in hundreds of PowerPoints, mission statements, media releases and home-pages, and long since departed to the graveyard of corporate-speak cliche. But here’s the thing – culture…

The $17 billion West Australian Government super fund, GESB, has terminated its asset consulting contract with Mercer Investment Consulting following a review. The new consultant is JANA Investment Advisers. Mercer is understood to be continuing to provide actuarial advice to the defined benefit part of the fund. (A GESB spokesperson was unavailable last week to…