More comment – Page 14
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Opinion PiecesLetter from Australia: Trustee accountability in focus
Despite having billions of assets under management, Australia’s superannuation funds have share capital ranging from as little as A$12 (€7.9) to A$100 (€66.2).
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Opinion PiecesLetter from US: US pension funds decide on Russian holdings
“We support efforts at all levels of government and across the public and private sectors, which include cross-functional and multi-agency partnerships, to divest State Treasury and pension funds from investments in Russian-domiciled companies. We are committed to taking steps that include divesting as soon as possible to have the quickest and most meaningful impact on this tragic situation.”
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Opinion PiecesUK's pension dashboard project should prioritise accuracy over simplification
The UK’s Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) consultation on the draft Pensions Dashboards Regulations 2022 closed last month. The DWP now aims to lay the regulations before parliament for debate later in the year.
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Opinion PiecesGuest viewpoint: The fault with the default setting for COVID mortality in standard tables
The Continuous Mortality Investigation (CMI) is a subsidiary company of the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries (IFoA) in the UK. The CMI has a long history of providing high-quality and impartial analysis on mortality and morbidity. It is mainly focused on gathering data to produce standard mortality tables across various sub-populations of interest to actuaries, including term assurances, annuitants and pension schemes.
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: Inflation – becoming yesterday’s story
Although fears of an inflationary spiral may seem justified, a deeper analysis suggests otherwise
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: A new kind of political risk
Peter Kraneveld argues that investors should take the possibility of future economic and financial sanctions against other countries seriously
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: The pathway to net zero needs Scope 3 emissions
Accounting for Scope 3 is challenging, but integrating these emissions allows for better monitoring of pathways to decarbonisation
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: As inflation psychology kicks in pension plans must act
Pascal Blanqué, chair of the Amundi Institute, says it’s a mistake to assume the inflation spike is merely a blip
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Opinion PiecesGuest viewpoint: Women in corporate workforce
While diversity, equity and inclusion in the workforce may mean different things in different societies, gender diversity has the same meaning across the world
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Opinion PiecesEditor's letter: Could CDC provide a solution to the pension income problem?
This month sees the close of a consultation in the UK on a new code of practice for authorisation and supervision of collective defined contribution (CDC) pensions schemes. Trustees will be able to apply to set one up from August this year.
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: Greenwashing needs to be pinned down
On 10 March 2022, the EU’s Sustainable Finance Disclosure Regulation (SFDR) turns one. In terms of how it was drafted and how it has been implemented, it hasn’t exactly covered itself in glory, although it was high time regulators got involved to try to bring some order into ESG-land.
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Opinion PiecesNotes from the Netherlands: Inflation could bolster pension reforms
The Dutch pension agreement, paving the way for a change from a defined benefit to defined contribution-type system, was concluded in the pre-COVID summer of 2019. But it is still waiting to be implemented, with the delay blamed on the protracted negotiations following Dutch parliamentary elections in March 2021.
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Opinion PiecesLetter from Australia: Global firms circle last bank-owned super fund
Several global firms, including private equity giant KKR and asset manager Vanguard, have thrown their hat in the ring to buy one of the last Australian bank-owned superannuation businesses.
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Opinion PiecesLetter from US: ESG faces backlash in some US states over fossil fuels
Is there a backlash against the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investing movement?
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Opinion PiecesGuest Viewpoint – Nicholas Benes: The stock exchange of the future
In 2060, the world may look back at decades of convulsive changes in equity markets, guided by optimism that civilisation might just make it. People might remember that at some point during the second decade of the 21st century the earth suddenly exceeded 1.5°C of warming over pre-industrial times, sparking mass protests and turbocharging activism, focusing even more on ESG themes and ‘shareholder democracy’. Global movements will have been propelled by strange weather phenomena and the participation of young people, who had gained deeper understanding of equity markets than ever before.
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Opinion PiecesViewpoint: The Roadmap to a net-zero, nature-positive economy
Laurent Babikian, joint global director of capital markets at CDP, explores specific actions that companies, capital markets and regulators must take to accelerate the transition to a net-zero, nature-positive economy
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Opinion PiecesPEPP could be a slow-burn success if big asset managers help
When early pan-European pension concepts took shape, spearheaded by the late Koen de Ryck of Pragma Consulting and his groundbreaking 1996 report, there was a vision that cross-border pension provision by the likes of Unilever and Shell would provide a European model for DB pensions that would boost labour mobility, take workplace retirement provision to under-served markets and set standards for the future.
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Opinion PiecesThe EU taxonomy needs rescuing
The EU taxonomy, a system for identifying what economic activities count as sustainable, has been in the spotlight since the news broke on new year’s eve about a proposal from the European Commission to extend it to cover nuclear energy and natural gas. It is unclear how long the controversy will last.
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Opinion PiecesLetter from Australia: Superfunds focus on retirement income
When you’ve spent as much time around superannuation as I have, you get to see a lot of eggs,” says senior corporate regulator Helen Rowell. “Images of eggs, usually in nests, often painted gold, frequently laying on a bed of $100 notes.”
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Opinion PiecesLetter from US: Upcoming court ruling could create complications for DC plan sponsors
By the first half of this year, the United States Supreme Court is expected to issue a decision that could affect the defined-contribution (DC) industry. The case is Hughes vs Northwestern University, one of about 150 similar class-action lawsuits filed nationally in the past few years, alleging that plan fiduciaries breached their duty of prudence under ERISA, the Employee Retirement Income Security Act of 1974.
