News

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…

Northern Trust has won another passive global equities gig with a bank-owned KiwiSaver fund following a mandate reshuffle at the Westpac scheme in New Zealand. Australia’s Ninety One was also a winner in the reshuffle. Along with several other changes, Northern Trust picked up a spot among six managers on the Westpac/BT international equities panel,…

Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation has partnered with Lifeline to bolster mental health support services and to assist programs aimed at destigmatising mental illness. The super fund joined SuperFriend as that organisation’s 24th super industry partner in August last year. The three-year partnership with Lifeline will see CSC, which has 730,000 members and more than $50 billion…

State Street Global Advisors will sharpen its ESG efforts on climate change and corporate racial diversity in 2021, adopting a more activist approach with investee companies. In a letter to major global corporations this month (January 11), Cyrus Taraporevala, SSGA chief, says the US$3.1 trillion manager will use its financial clout to pressure companies to…

Former BlackRock executive Holly Framsted is to become head of ETFs for Capital Group in the US, which plans to launch a slate of both equity and fixed income actively managed listed funds in 2022. Capital, which has about US$2 trillion (A$2.6 trillion) under management, will be adding the ETFs to about 40 mutual funds…

When a 25-year-old English fund manager with £21 billion (A$37 billion) under management discloses it had made a sizable investment in bitcoin, it is bound to give the institutionalisation of the crypto currency a big kickalong. This is especially so when the manager regards bitcoin as a potential store of wealth and not an alternative…

While distressed debt funds have mushroomed to record levels in major markets, helped by the belief that the pandemic is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, Asia has languished. Already a small market for the broader private debt alternatives asset class, Asian distressed debt funds in the market for capital have declined over the past five years, from…