Analysis

Insight Investment has put the case for active asset allocation for investors over the market cycle, but especially now when both traditional defensive and growth assets are at troubling levels. In a webinar last week (February 25), Bruce Murphy, the Australia and New Zealand country head for Insight, a BNY Mellon company, said that there…

US markets could halve settlement times by 2023 in a move aimed at dramatically cutting margin costs and reducing risk, according to financial infrastructure provider The Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation (DTCC). The DTCC proposal released in the wake of the GameStop brouhaha that highlighted margin bottlenecks in the system would see US securities trading…

Michael Power, the high-profile head of strategy for global fund manager Ninety One – formerly Investec Asset Management – presided over a research project last year, called ‘The Road to 2030’. He now says: “2030 is closer than you think.” Power spoke at an investor webinar last month (February 16) in which he laid out…

The major asset servicing firms are widening their field of vision and have, for the most part, become front-to-back-office providers, as middle-office outsourcing becomes ubiquitous for big investors and managers. It is a development which has taken place concurrently with tightening revenue streams among asset managers, which are often under the same ownership umbrella as…

Super funds and other asset owners are adapting to the lingering impact of the pandemic through a big jump in manager searches, according to the latest quarterly report from bfinance. The global fund search and advisory firm has reported a 34 per cent increase in the number of searches in 2020 compared with 2019, with…

The world’s major pension systems enjoyed their strongest year, last year, for growth compared to GDP, since 1998. The bad news, of course, is that the average 11.2 per cent rise for many countries this helped by stalling or falling GDP. The annual ‘Global Pension Assets Study, 2021’ from the Thinking Ahead Institute based in…

Index providers should face the same regulatory hurdles as investment managers, a new US legal paper argues. In the US, plain-vanilla indexers are regarded as information ‘publishers’. The University of Virginia School of Law (UVS) report says most index providers are de facto ‘investment advisers’ – a term under US law that includes fund managers…

One in five Australian institutional investors has terminated a fund manager where ESG factors have been a “primary or major factor” in the decision, according to a survey by bfinance, the global research and institutional advisory business. A further 41 per cent of those Australian investors surveyed said that, while not the main reason for…

The switch in focus to retirement incomes, ahead of the introduction of the Retirement Income Covenant, was evident at the annual SMSF Association conference last week. Deborah Ralston said: “Super has been a bit overdone”. Ralston, one of the panellists on the Government’s Retirement Income Review (RIR), which handed down its report in July 2020,…

If APRA wants to continue to encourage super fund mergers the regulator needs to make some changes to how it goes about its approvals process, according to one chief executive who is going through the process of having a successor fund transfer (TFR). Speaking at last weeks’ annual ASFA conference (on February 11), Leeanne Turner,…

Amundi Asset Management, Europe’s largest fund manager, has launched two strategies to build on its ESG-related offerings, a European equities and US equities fund, both of which focus on companies which are improving their ESG credentials. The three points of differentiation with the new funds are: an exclusion policy covering companies which sit outside the…

Lifecycle strategies have some problems. One, is how they compare their performance. Two, is how they explain their asset allocation. And three is whether they really fit APRA’s regulatory definition for a MySuper default fund. Alex Dunnin, the executive director of research at Rainmaker Research, who has been studying lifecycle products for the several years…