News

The Standing Committee on Economics is launching a new inquiry into big super. Not everybody is happy about it. Compulsory viewing for many professionals and reporters, the Standing Committee on Economics is infamous for its hardball interrogations of Australia’s biggest institutional investors, and the announcement of a new inquiry will likely have some stakeholders tearing…

Aon will pay a US$1 billion break fee to Willis Towers Watson after a proposed marriage between the two global insurance broking and professional services firms fell over last week due to US regulatory problems. In a joint statement (July 27), Aon and Willis Towers Watson (WTW) blamed the end of their 16-month engagement on…

Bryan Gray, who retired from full-time work this year after a distinguished career in asset servicing, has taken on a role as ‘brand ambassador’ at Goal Group in Australia. The new part-time role involves working with Goal’s clients and prospects on their use of the firm’s technology services behind class action monitoring, filing and recoveries…

Gold has intrigued investors for almost as long as its existence, first as a store of wealth and currency and now as, well, what? Frontier, has taken a look at gold’s worth to professional investors. And it’s not about an inflation hedge. Frontier’s Chris Trevillyan, director of investment strategy, and Nicholas Thomas, senior consultant, have…

An Australian super fund has seeded a boutique emerging market debt (EMD) fund as instos look overseas for yield. But challenges for the asset class abound. As Argentina approached its presidential primaries in August 2019, the team at EMD boutique Finisterre grew wary. The primaries would take place during a low liquidity month; they were…

With the advent of Your Future Your Super (YFYS) Australia’s super funds are more closely examining their indexing options. The trick is ensuring member outcomes don’t suffer. Benchmark-relative risk is now top of mind for super funds, with specialist implementation manager Parametric seeing a substantial uptick in the number of funds taking an interest in…

The collapse of an investee company has seen IFM hauled before the standing committee on economics. The bigger issue is how a fund manager keeps commercial matters confidential in Parliament. The hot topic at Thursday’s (29 July) hearing of the standing committee on economics was Tandem, a workplace contractor and IFM investee that has now…

The Government’s ‘Retirement Income Covenant’ is off to a shaky start following initial reactions to its position paper. There is a complete absence of detail for super funds to ponder. While welcoming the Government’s move on the subject and the aim for resulting legislation to be non-prescriptive in nature, three influential and apolitical organisations have…

BlackRock, the biggest investment house in the known universe, now holds sway over about a quarter of the NZ retail fund market after cementing a deal with ASB last week to oversee some $20 billion. The ASB move to outsource most investment decisions to BlackRock coincides with the transition of an estimated $10 billion of…

After a soft streak in a chaotic 2020, the IPO market is expected to take off with a “strong pipeline” of new floats coming through 2021, according to HLB Mann Judd. The Australian IPO market is gaining pace after a sluggish period that saw a scant $132 million raised in the first half of 2020,…

Exogenous factors, such as wars, can and do impact markets but rarely do we get to see a medical crisis play out quite like this. It is science versus the unknown. At a briefing featuring three of its managers last week (July 21), distributor and multi-affiliate manager GSFM provided a snapshot of how the managers…

Third-party distributor 3PD has partnered with an Indian equities manager, ValueQuest Capital, for the institutional and wholesale markets in Australia and New Zealand. ValueQuest, a boutique with a seven-year track record for its offshore strategy, known as ‘ValueQuest India Moat Fund’, was formed in early in 2013. Sanjay Bakshi, and Paresh Thakker are the founders,…