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State Super of NSW, the biggest defined benefit fund in Australia, has upped the pace in building a professional investment team. Following the recruitment of Mark O’Brien, formerly the AMP Capital CIO, last month, the fund has now secured two new senior investment executives and has two more to be announced soon. The $A36 billion…

SuperRatings is looking to emulate its Australian success, including its established annual awards system for funds, with a Hong Kong ratings business for the nascent MPF Employee Choice Arrangement (ECA) pension funds, which came into force last November. MPF Ratings, the Hong Kong subsidiary run by former Australian fund management executive Francis Chung, will hold…

Ron Liling, one of the founders of Intech Financial Services, was offered the investment consulting part of his former business a couple of years after he’d sold it to Skandia. If he’d bought it back, he says, he would have changed it to a strategy consulting firm. “Picking managers is a mug’s game,” Liling said…

Sunsuper has made the decision to follow the likes of the Future Fund and First State Super and divest its holdings in any company producing tobacco products. Tony Lally, chief executive of the $22 billion fund, said the decision to cut their investment was made for a number of reasons and no one reason was…

Having just completed a roadshow marketing its World Bank green bond fund in Australia, and a series of general institutional presentations on the firm’s integration with parent Nikko Asset Management, Tyndall Investment Management is now embarking on a marketing campaign for its Australian investment strategies. The $A23 billion firm, acquired by Nikko in late 2010,…

Former head of All Star Funds, Kate Mulligan, has set up a management consulting firm specializing in funds management – King Irving Consulting Group. Mulligan, who practiced law with Allens and Freehills before getting into the funds management industry with Tyndall Investment Management in 1995, said King Irving (named after her grandfather) would provide both…

The new chief executive officer of AIST, Tom Garcia, is working with all related parties to ensure the right SuperStream frameworks are in place by July 1, 2013, when all super funds need to be compliant (with employers to follow July 1, 2014). “There is a lot of work being done around understanding SuperStream and…

Dimensional Fund Advisors is speaking with a number of super funds about its Managed DC platform that will allow funds to create investment options for individual members rather than maintain the current one-size-fits all. The Managed DC option was designed by Nobel Prize-winning academic Robert Merton – resident scientist at Dimensional and professor of finance…

Bob Geldof, in Australia to spruik his upcoming Boomtown Rats concert but also his private equity fund in Africa – 8 Miles – called on major super funds to choose Africa as their next alternative investment option rather than China. In response to queries about Africa’s transparency Geldof cited the following numbers regarding corruption. “You…

In the competitive world of global equities strategies it is increasingly difficult to stand out from the crowd. In Europe and Asia Pacific, for instance, Mercer Investment Consulting lists nearly 200 global equities managers offering their services to institutional clients. So, when there’s a new(ish) entrant to the market, there is reason for a raft…

To understand the future is to understand the past. At the pointy end of the investment process, the story of the evolution of asset servicing can provide an important guide to the future, especially in the rapidly developing Asia Pacific region. In this regard, Northern Trust is a valuable case study. When Steven Fradkin joined…

Japan is proposing to remove some of the restrictions around short-selling in a move that should have a flow-on effect to the securities lending market and overall liquidity in the Japanese sharemarket. The main proposal is the removal of the ‘up-tick rule’, which prohibits short-selling at or below current prices – that is, the price…