The International Family Office Association (IFOA), an ideas-exchange for the ultra-wealthy, was recently launched in Sydney.
Health Super buys another fund's PE assets
Health Super has acquired legacy private equity assets from another super fund as it seeks opportunities in the domestic market through a Canberra-based manager.
SSgA's domestic sales boss exits
The head of institutional business development and client service for State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) in Australia has exited the business.
Hyro an unlikely hero of meltdown
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We at Unbalanced love it when an Australian does something world-first, even if the honour in question is somewhat dubious. An ‘honour’, say, such as placer of the very first call to the administrators of Lehman Brothers in September 2008. As Wall Street burned, the board of the ASX-listed technology small-cap, Hyro Limited, realised it had a problem. It was a A$21 million problem, actually, in the form of a convertible note taken out in July 2008 (nice timing!) which now gave the corpse of Lehman a stranglehold over the Melbournebased security software vendors. “When we woke to the [Lehman collapse] news, we knew the wind-up process would be incredibly lengthy, so we thought it best to get on the front foot,” reminisced Hyro’s chairman, Robert Clarke, last month. “The administrators in Hong Kong [dealing with Lehman’s Asia- Pacific business] told us we were the first counterparty in the world to have called.” With the note’s fixed and floating charges restricting Hydro’s every move, Clarke needed a quick resolution and his place at the head of the queue got him one, at least by the standards of other Lehman victims still before the courts. By August 2009, Hyro had struck a deal whereby the Lehman liquidators forgave the debt in return for a 17 per cent stake in the company, as well as some cash raised from divestments, including the obligatory underperforming subsidiaries in China and New Zealand. The company is now focused on Idaptive, which claims to help the many IT systems heading into the Cloud keep their identity and access management grounded. Hyro is even feeling chipper enough to be going back to the capital markets, to raise $4 million of which three-quarters will be used to retire a longstanding debt to the Australian Tax Office. The patient owner of 8 per cent of the company, the Macquarie small-caps fund run by Neil Carter, will no doubt be at the head of the queue of those approached.
Greater SG boosts more than super
If you were a student of economics or politics in the 1980s or early 1990s, you will remember the debate that raged on national savings. We were all told Australians did not save enough and that as a result our current account deficit was too large. JOHN BROGDEN, CEO of the FSC, writes.
Technology drives break from the past
Investment administrators have access to new technologies which can usurp the layers of complexity that have accrued over the years, reduce the rate of errors and enhance services, write the CEO of the Milestone Group GEOFF HODGE and PHIL DAVIES, chief technology officer. Technological innovation comes in cycles. Every 10 or 15 years, a new wave of solutions comes along and shakes up industry standards, forcing users, administrators and funds managers to think again about the systems they use on a daily basis. We are at such a point today. Little more than a decade ago it was all about automating departmental workflows and eliminating the most egregious paper trails. Since then, some formidable systems have been built up and have gradually added more complex functionalities to investment administration. However, built on the mantra that greater automation leads to greater efficiencies, these systems are now at the point where the marginal utility of the architecture, the technology and the operational structures is all but exhausted. A radical change is needed in the way technology is viewed and deployed at an enterprise-wide level.
Funds, join the conversation
Superannuation suffers from some truly large disadvantages when it comes to social media: it’s factual, it’s not entertaining, and Charlie Sheen is not tweeting about his transition to retirement problems. The challenges facing super funds are to engage, entertain, and trust their members. PHILIPPA YELLAND reports.
Breaking News: ACSI’s decade of action
As the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (ACSI) prepares to host its 10th annual conference in Melbourne this month, MICHAEL BAILEY spoke with Michael O’Sullivan, the organisation’s long-serving president, about its historical highlights and future. The roots of the ACSI lie in a trip that Michael O’Sullivan took to the Netherlands in 2000. It’s hard to imagine now, but at the start of this century virtually no superannuation funds used the voting rights attached to their shares. That was left to their funds managers, whose cosy relationship with the top end of town meant that any advocacy was conducted behind closed doors, rather than in the unseemly form of a negative vote at an annual general meeting.
Fighting inflation risk in global portfolios
It’s one of the biggest questions bedevilling investors today: how to deal with inflation, and whether to do so actively or passively. Last month, Investment Magazine partnered with QIC Global Fixed Interest to bring together some of Australia’s leading investment minds to tackle that very question. Present at the discussion were:
Innovation Extraction
Australian venture capital is an almost forgotten asset class. In the past decade, institutional investors – particularly those who lost money in the dotcom crash – have bypassed the industry in favour of other alternative strategies. But are they right in doing so? Some practitioners argue the mining boom provides the right conditions for resources entrepreneurs to build highly profitable businesses and provide venture capitalists with a rich series of vintages. Others expect more pain in the industry for years to come. SIMON MUMME reports on the current state of Australian venture.
