Vision Super chief investment officer and deputy CEO Michael Wyrsch will head up the investment operations after its merger with Active Super. Key roles are also being filled at other funds, as merger activity continues to reshape the profile of the superannuation sector.
REST has appointed Gideon Lipman to the newly created chief of staff role, reporting to CEO Vicki Doyle.
There is one investment area where Insignia’s $180 billion super arm has not lost money for the past 17 years, which is what it calls the insurance-related investments. The alternatives strategy is gaining popularity among asset owners due to its diversification benefit, but Insignia’s super and asset management investment chief Dan Farmer warns it is a space where investors can suffer if they “stumble in without doing the homework”.
Private equity firm Bain Capital has once again matched rival suitor CC Capital’s bid for Insignia Financial in a month-long takeover tug-of-war that is showing little signs of cooling down. The announcement coincided with a quarterly earnings update that saw the PE investors’ target report a loss of $424 million in advised super assets.
Listed technology group Iress will sell its superannuation administration business to Apex Group, a company that offers a range of financial services and solutions.
The task of creating a world-class retirement system is only half-done, the Grattan Institute says. In a new report, it proposes a fix to the retirement phase based on systematic annuitisation, alongside account-based pensions, to circumvent reliance on individual funds getting their act together under the Retirement Income Covenant, which it says will take too long and produce inconsistent outcomes for members.
The $34 billion Brighter Super is set to shift a significant proportion of equities assets in MySuper from passive to active management. Chief investment officer Mark Rider says the move is possible because of the scale created by mergers, and the fund will be looking to its newly appointed active managers to generate performance through the cycle by taking idiosyncratic risks.
Insignia Financial has received another sweetened offer from CC Capital, offering $4.6 cash per share to acquire the wealth giant.
The brunt of losses from the LA wildfires are expected to be borne by primary insurers and high-risk reinsurance programs, but super funds are nevertheless closely monitoring the possible impact of the fires on catastrophe bond and insurance-linked securities exposures.
The hydrogen revolution is well and truly underway. The so-called “smart money”, including Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Jeff Bezos’ Climate Pledge Fund and Khosla Ventures, has placed early bets on natural hydrogen, despite uncertainties around its location and whether it can be economically extracted. Here is a brief form guide for asset owners disinclined to do their own deep due diligence.
The Coalition is reportedly considering a proposal to reduce the superannuation guarantee to 9 per cent if it wins the election. Many in the industry would understandably view any such move as a partisan effort to weaken the system, but they must also be open-minded about the evidence and accept that improving quality of service is the best response to critics.
Two years in a row, Norges Bank has topped the Global Pension Transparency Benchmark, published by Investment Magazine sister publication, Top1000funds. But when interviewed in 2023 about being awarded the most transparent fund, it was clearly a priority but not yet a completed project for the Norges Bank CEO, Nicolai Tangen. In the year since then, the fund has taken the idea of transparency and run with it, making huge gains through a concerted effort that among other things required advocating the government to make governance changes.
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Investment Magazine provides in-depth, monthly analysis of trends and developments for all the businesses in which superannuation funds engage‚ including asset allocation, investment manager selection, custody and fund accounting, member administration, group insurance and compliance.
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