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(Pictured: Daniel Farley) One of the few benefits of the global financial crisis is the way some of the big global fund managers have addressed the stark realisation that investors don’t necessarily want the type of investing they have been getting for the past 20 years. State Street Global Advisors is the latest to launch…

(Pictured: Greg O’Sullivan) The foreign exchange trading platform provider 360T is expanding in Australia with the recruitment of a Sydney-based executive to concentrate on super funds and other fiduciary investors. Greg O’Sullivan will be taking on his old employer, State Street, in the new role. Visiting Australia last week from his Singapore base, the Australian-born…

(Pictured: David Hartley) It was always going to be a tall order to follow Don Luke as CEO at Sunsuper. Now, Tony Lally’s sudden departure late last month has shone a spotlight on the fund, including a review of its investment department by Towers Watson of the UK.GREG BRIGHT reports. Staff, the board, clients and…

AMP is restructuring its senior management in a series of personnel changes designed to save about $200 million a year under CEO-elect Craig Meller. The company is combining the leadership teams of  AMP Ltd and AMP Financial Services. Current CEO, Craig Dunn, announced last week that he would step down from next January. The company…

(Pictured: Peter Bull) Consultants at Ibbotson Associates Australia have written a critique of smart beta products and suggest that investors need to add a “fifth dimension” to the usual characteristics to look for in such a strategy – capital preservation. The asset consultants – Peter Bull, who is head of portfolio construction, and Michael Ng,…

(pictured: Graeme Arnott and Gerard Parlevliet) By Greg Bright Talking to Gerard Parlevliet and Graeme Arnott, winners of this year’s CIO and COO of the Year Awards, and you can discern some clear themes in how they approach their roles at big super funds. A major theme is that they need to be deeply involved…

After what has appeared to be a long hiatus, AMP is moving ahead with plans to offer asset management services to the Chinese market through its strategic alliance with China Life. A public disclosure last week for approval of a business name registration for China Life-AMP indicates the two are likely to go ahead with…

While the ramifications of the Eurozone’s debt concerns have heightened in recent weeks and with the euro finally coming in for a correction, the global investment risk research firm Check Risk has given Australia a better report in its latest weekly risk assessment. Check Risk produced an update on the velocity of money in the…

Chris Briant has been appointed chief executive of the Australian and New Zealand arm of specialist manager Parametric Portfolio Associates, one of the five affiliates of the listed US manager Eaton Vance, which has also been boosting its Australian presence in other ways. Briant finished up recently at Tibra Investment Management, where he was chief…

While funds managers pride, and sell, themselves on their skill and while asset consultants and super funds forever debate their ability to identify skill, it is only recently that there has been a serious discussion about investment implementation and execution skills as an area also demanding of scrutiny. And we can thank the much-maligned high-frequency…

The word that springs readily to Graeme Miller’s mind when asked about the impact of regulatory change on super fund investments is “fatigue”. “MySuper is on top of Stronger Super, on top of SuperStream… it doesn’t seem to stop,” the director of investment services at Towers Watson told the annual AIST end-of-financial-year breakfast last week….

Stephen O’Brien, the former chief executive of Deutsche Asset Management in Australia, has joined the advisory and marketing firm Brookvine as executive director, starting today. Steve Hall, Brookvine’s chief executive, said the recruitment of O’Brien, with whom he had worked in the late 1980s at ipac, showed the firm was continuing to invest in the…