Investment News

The major asset servicing firms are widening their field of vision and have, for the most part, become front-to-back-office providers, as middle-office outsourcing becomes ubiquitous for big investors and managers. It is a development which has taken place concurrently with tightening revenue streams among asset managers, which are often under the same ownership umbrella as… [Read More…]

Ares Management will buy 60 per cent of the AMP Capital private markets investment business in a proposed deal announced this morning. After ditching efforts to by all of the ASX-listed AMP in February, the US investment firm has instead opted for a more limited joint-venture arrangement to be explored over the next 30 days… [Read More…]

Proposed new restrictions on financial product advertising could backfire, exposing investors to greater risk of harm from unlicensed operators, according to submissions to the regulator. Under the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) proposed advertising guidelines released last November, regulated providers would be disadvantaged compared to the light-touch treatment of wholesale offers, the Boutique Investment Group (BIG)… [Read More…]

The NZX-owned Wealth Technologies investment platform is still aiming to hit a high-end $50 billion of funds under administration (FUA) in two years despite missing its 2020 target. In its annual results released last week, the NZX reported Wealth Technologies FUA of just over $7 billion, which was up more than 200 per cent year-on-year… [Read More…]

Russell Investments NZ has published a new research paper on the fundamental measures underpinning the emerging science (or art) of investment decarbonisation. Amid an explosion of low-carbon investment solutions as a proxy to manage climate change-related portfolio risks and opportunities, investors need to learn more about the various underlying metrics used in different strategies, the… [Read More…]

Anti-money laundering (AML) is one of the biggest compliance headaches in financial services, which explains the constant demand for pain relief. For example, in this year alone two new offers have launched in NZ, tackling the AML analgesic market from different angles. Early in February, Avid AML went live with a software product targeting small-to-medium… [Read More…]

Bryan Gray, a genuine stalwart of, and major contributor to, the strong position of Australia and New Zealand’s asset servicing sector, has retired. He spent 12 years at State Street followed by nearly 20 years at J.P. Morgan. Gray is the only person to have been chair of the Australian Custodial Services Association twice, in… [Read More…]

Index providers should face the same regulatory hurdles as investment managers, a new US legal paper argues. The University of Virginia School of Law (UVS) report says most index providers are de facto ‘investment advisers’ – a term under US law that includes fund managers and multi-manager firms – and should be policed as such…. [Read More…]

Some fixed income investors have taken advantage of the Reddit retail rage to exit risky bond positions, according to a new analysis by US firm Eaton Vance Management. Eaton Vance says while the price of shares in a handful of short-targeted companies such as GameStop hogged most of the attention in the January, the chaos… [Read More…]

The world piled on a further US$24 trillion in 2020 increasing the total debt mountain to a new peak of US$281 trillion, according to the Institute of International Finance (IIF) analysis of 61 countries. As governments and corporates scrambled to cover COVID-related revenue needs the average global debt-to-GDP jumped a massive 35 per cent last… [Read More…]