Scale helps Sunsuper cut fees, keep big pension accounts

A combination of scale and forecast cost savings of running member administration and financial planning inhouse enabled the $12 billion Sunsuper to make a recent fee cut across pension accounts. The move echoes BUSS(Q)’s move two years ago to abolish all fees for allocated pensioners, although that has failed to attract as many of the high account balances as was hoped. In March, Sunsuper announced a 0.1 per cent reduction in fees, to 0.25 per cent, for the first $300,000 of pension accounts.

Read more

Sydney manager seeded with $115m to ease your liquidity stress

With $115 million in seed funding from an offshore equity partner, Sydney-based Shearwater Capital has begun targeting illiquid credit and special situations investment opportunities in the domestic corporate and real estate sectors. In June 2008, the manager, whose four co-founders have experience in both funds management and investment banking, was seeded by the US$3 billion Reservoir Capital Group, a US manager that invests stakes in new private equity and hedge fund managers, in addition to running its own portfolios.


Read more

Sydney manager seeded with $115m to ease your liquidity stress

With $115 million in seed funding from an offshore equity partner, Sydney-based Shearwater Capital has begun targeting illiquid credit and special situations investment opportunities in the domestic corporate and real estate sectors. In June 2008, the manager, whose four co-founders have experience in both funds management and investment banking, was seeded by the US$3 billion Reservoir Capital Group, a US manager that invests stakes in new private equity and hedge fund managers, in addition to running its own portfolios.

Read more

Russell to take more trade execution from managers

Managers wanting a piece of Russell Investment Management’s $3.5 billion core Australian equities multimanager fund will have to swallow their pride and surrender at least some of the trade execution, as the multimanager plans to expand its ’emulation’ program within the fund after encouraging early results.

Read more

Lessons from a fund merger: Maritime case study

With more mergers between super funds tipped for the next few years due to action on capital gains tax relief, NAB Custodian Services and KPMG are presenting a timely case study with Maritime Super, the result of the merger between SERF and Seafarers’ super funds.

Read more

Much talk, scarce action from funds on climate change investing

The financial crisis and negative member returns have sidelined many super funds’ plans to combat the risks of climate change, but commitments to factor these risks into investment portfolios is still strong, a survey from the Climate Institute and the Australian Institute of Superannuation Trustees (AIST) has found.

Read more