Analysis

Thanks in part to the pandemic, employers have sufficient awareness of mental health problems in the workforce, their human and economic costs. Now is the time for programs to solve them. A multi-country multi-industry webinar last week (December 9) looked at how employers should learn from the impact of covid-19 and put in place processes…

Casey Quirk, the funds management advisory arm of Deloitte, has predicted more M&A activity because of the continued better profits coming from alternative over traditional managers. In a client report last week (December 9) Casey Quirk says alternatives managers, or those primarily focused on private markets, consistently generate higher profit margins than traditional firms, or…

The uncomfortable truth is that slavery, even in its more modern form, still exists. The UN estimates there are approximately 40 million victims of modern slavery around the world. The exploitation of people for commercial gain is deeply intertwined into everyday products and services through our global supply chains. This is a serious global issue…

Private markets assets are “ripe for the picking” for fund managers and administrators quick to use distributed ledger technology, as investment operations are on the cusp of “great change”. So said David Mackaway, the COO of Challenger Group, at the Calastone ‘Connect Forum’ last week (December 2. He was interviewed by Justin Christopher, Calastone director…

With COP26 a turning point in net-zero thinking, at least for investors and managers, Ninety One has expressed concern over insufficient focus on ‘real world decarbonisation’. The global multi-asset and specialist manager is presenting its 2022 investment outlooks presentation, ‘The Challenges of Normalisation’, this week (from December 6). In it, Hendrik du Toit, Ninety One’s…

AMP has a long road ahead. But the big challenge isn’t to change the culture – it’s making everybody else care about it. For decades, the AMP logo has sat high above Sydney Harbour, a potent symbol of one of Australia’s oldest companies and an integral part of what many consider entirely peripheral: brand. Now…

When it comes to the question of who’s actually doing the research work, investors know the answer. And they don’t feel like sitting on the sidelines during a crisis. Some trends you can see from space. Inflows into ESG equity funds on the Calastone network between January and November were US$30 billion – 60 per…

Fund managers are subject to behavioural biases like all of us, such as over-confidence, short-termism and memory distortions. Take their predictive abilities. They are not, on average, especially good. In a unique report for clients, Frontier has published what amounts to a longitudinal study based on eight years of conversations, surveys and other communications with…

Member engagement is starting to rise from a very low base. But the industry is still “net nowhere” when it comes to winning their hearts and minds. It’s widely acknowledged that member engagement remains unacceptably low. Try as they might, super funds can’t seem to get members to care about their retirement savings, as evidenced…

The economic aftermath of Covid-19 was never going to be as bad as it seemed at the time. But governments will be hooked on splashing cash. “Economic scarring” was all anybody could talk about in the immediate aftermath of the first wave of Covid-19, and for good reason; it’s well understood that the effects of…

The companies that will survive the tectonic shift to net zero will be the ones that innovate and engage, according to GAM. “What we’re going into is a scenario where those companies that are going to survive and thrive are those that recognise net zero as the North Star and look at their strategy around…

Today’s investors are “riding for a fall”, according to Oaktree Capital founder Howard Marks. Markets could well be in for a repeat of the Nifty Fifty. When Howard Marks was just starting his career in finance in 1969, the preceding 20 years had been “a “mostly unchanging backdrop… in front of which events and cycles…