News

Shortly after David Neal was appointed as the inaugural CIO of the Future Fund, the guardians approved the appointment of global custodian Northern Trust as its asset servicing partner. No big deal, you’d think. Well, welcome to the world of high-profile public sector investing. After the announcement, in May 2007, Sydney’s ‘Daily Telegraph’ tabloid led…

Parametric Portfolio Associates has promoted Whitlam Zhang to fill the research role formerly held by Raewyn Williams, who resigned late last year. He becomes manager research and strategy for Australia and New Zealand. In the role, Zhang reports to both Chris Briant, the Australia and New Zealand head of Parametric’s parent Eaton Vance, and Paul…

Interim Mercer NZ chief investment officer, Ronan McCabe, has been upgraded to permanent following a long recruitment process to replace, Philip Houghton-Brown. The Sydney-based McCabe stepped into the breach last September when Houghton-Brown departed for the head of investment solutions role at BT Funds. Post the official internal promotion, he continues to hold his previous…

The gap between fund flows for ESG-focused funds and their regular equity, multi-asset and bond counterparts in emerging markets widened further in the past six months, according to figures from Informa Financial Intelligence, a global data provider. Informa’s EPFR (Emerging Portfolio Fund Research) database for emerging markets (EM) flows, shows that while the fund flows…

The United Nations’ Principles for Responsible Investment has elevated the importance of human rights and other social issues, including labour rights, in its latest three-year policy strategy. But climate change remains the number one issue for the organisation in the coming years. PRI, which was formed in 2006 and is the only global organisation addressing…

In an attempt to de-politicise the increasingly tense debate around the future of super, research group Chant West has published a summary of its views across a range of recently raised questions and ill-informed commentary. Chant West, which last year had a changing of the guard with the takeover by Zenith Investment Partners, produced a…

Custody and asset servicing outshone asset and wealth management profitability at Northern Trust globally in the December quarter, as interest income slumped 20 per cent and charges from a 500-person jobs cut program hit home. In an earnings call with brokers last week (January 21), Mike O’Grady, Northern’s chairman and chief executive, said: “Our asset…

The NZ Superannuation Fund has slightly lifted both long-term outperformance and risk expectations in its latest ‘reference portfolio’ review while removing an explicit emerging markets benchmark from the process.

After a review which took just over a year, State Street has been awarded the challenging asset servicing task of transitioning Perpetual Investment Management’s Australian funds management business. The ultimate prize may be to also take on the bigger asset base from the Perpetual group’s new US fund management subsidiaries. The announcement last week (January…

Amundi Asset Management, Europe’s largest fund manager, has reassessed global developments over the past three months and produced a new outlook paper for markets in 2021. The latest view is more bullish than the last. The â‚¬1.66 trillion (A$2.01 trillion) manager says in a client report, ‘Cross Asset Investment Strategy’, that it expects better corporate fundamentals…

Raewyn Williams has resigned from Parametric Portfolio Australia and will leave the firm at the end of February, after seven years there. She is Australia’s best-known exponent of after-tax investing, who has been a prolific producer of global and Australian research on the topic. It is understood Williams, the managing director, research, who started her…

FNZ has won a last-ditch bid to relitigate the looming forced sale of Australian software firm GBST after the UK competition authority flagged possible mistakes in figures underpinning its earlier decision. In a notice published late last year, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) said it would refer the case back for a rethink after…