News

(Pictured: Martin Scott) A leading indicator of expected investment mandate activity – fund management sales recruitment – has picked up considerably. Here are several key hires to be announced in coming weeks, including the opening of a UK hedge fund firm’s office in Australia. >  Winton Capital, a UK-based hedge fund manager, which has been represented…

(Pictured: Rohan Singh) Northern Trust has picked up three big new asset servicing clients in Australia in the past few weeks, including, most recently, the $14.8 billion investments portfolio of IAG (Insurance Australia Group). While neither IAG nor Northern’s head of Australian business, Rohan Singh, were able to comment on the mandate last week, they supplied…

(Pictured: Phil Weinberg) We’ve been telling everyone for years but it now turns out that we were right: good execution of securities trading is important. It’s important not only for fund managers but also for super funds who are their clients and, increasingly, their competitors. Phillip Weinberg, the founder of Australia’s first broker-neutral trading firm, has…

(Pictured: John Stopford) There are many changes afoot in investment management and a lot of them are interlinked. The blending of fixed interest and multi-asset strategies is an interesting development, which is prompting pension funds to rethink the way they do asset allocation. After a 35-year bull market, global fixed interest is likely to be a…

(Pictured: Ron Bird) As submissions to the Financial System Inquiry are closed off, today, academics attached to the Paul Woolley Centre have questioned the fundamental assumption that a larger financial system is better for GDP than a smaller one. Professor Ron Bird and Dr Jack Gray, both former fund managers, produced a submission to the Inquiry…

(Pictured: Stephen Dunne) By Greg Bright Australian financial services firms have generally not travelled well. Of the banks, NAB lost a lot of money trying to expand in both the UK and US. Westpac never really became the bank of the Western Pacific as Pieter Huveneers* designed the name to be. ANZ has slowly gathered some…

(Pictured: Louise Davidson) By Penny Pryor Cbus is currently working with MSCI to identify the worst performing ESG stocks in the emerging markets index, for a new emerging markets index mandate. Speaking at a session on divestment at the Conference of Major Superannuation Funds last week, Louise Davidson, environmental, social and governance manager at Cbus…

(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…