News

AXA Investment Managers is losing two senior executives who have been instrumental in marketing the firm’s integrated ESG capabilities in Australia and New Zealand. They are Craig Hurt, former Australian country head, who left last week (September 30), and Matt Christensen, the global head of impact and responsible investments. While based in the firm’s headquarters…

The launch early in February this year of Australia’s first unlisted fund to be quoted on the ASX, by Magellan group and its administrator, Mainstream, took a while to sink in, not helped by the dislocation caused by the pandemic crisis. But, as Australia, at least, is preparing to get back to business at some…

Pal Sarai, the former senior executive at bfinance who pioneered the establishment of an Australian-based operation for the disruptive manager search and research company, has resigned to join a US-based specialist real estate firm. Sarai was a leading force behind bfinance’s expansion in the Asia Pacific and elsewhere for almost 10 years, most recently as…

The KiwiSaver market is getting more and more interesting for Australian fund managers, especially those with a wholesale and/or retail distribution capability. It has passed NZ$60 billion after 9 per cent growth in assets in the past year, according to the latest study. The growth – to NZ$62 billion (A$57.4 billion) – was more modest…

A sample of institutional asset owners and fund managers has confirmed their views on the increasing complexity around both asset allocation and the strategies they design. They also confirmed the increasing importance of technology but expressed annoyance at continuing room for improvement in some areas. According to the authors at the study’s promoter, global systems…

Robert Shiller, Nobel laureate in economics, wrote about stories and images being created around new economic events. COVID-19 has thrown up a sequence of images from the past, pushing governments and central banks into unknown territory. This is the current ‘Day After’ narrative. In its views on a post-crisis world, Amundi Asset Management, Europe-based global…

by Greg Bright Michael Mauboussin – investment manager, researcher, part-time academic and writer – likes his poker analogies. Investors, too, are players, and luck plays an important part in their success. In fact, with the rising tide of indexing over the past 10-or-more years, investors need more luck now because beating the other players is…

If active managers perform better than passive managers in volatile or downward-trending markets, then you’d have to think that very active managers, such as those which blend a mix of long and short positions, would do better still. And the evidence is, on average, they do. According to Sean Fenton, a long-short specialist manager, an…

J.P. Morgan is to move its Australian and New Zealand institutional clients who use its fund accounting services, which is most of them, to the global service provided by FIS’ InvestOne platform. While the migration of about 50 clients, plus new ones, will take several years to complete, it ends a longstanding relationship with Hi-Portfolio,…

One of the problems institutional investors and managers have faced in acting on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), launched in 2015, is that they are not all easily investable. Investors have had to feel their way around the 17 overarching goals and 170 targets to put their ESG philosophies and processes into a…

While investing following strong and integrated ESG principles does not readily spring to mind when considering China there is more action going on across the sustainability space there than many people think. The building blocks are already in place: a growing green credit market that is encouraging companies to invest in ESG-related projects, strategic government…

Acquisitive Auckland-based backoffice specialist MMC, which bought 50 per cent of Brisbane-based super admin firm IFAA in March, has refreshed its brand in a makeover that consigns the Aegis platform name to history. To be known as MMC Wealth Administration, the Aegis investment platform acquired from ASB last year now sits beside the company’s traditional…