Investment News

When Dominic Stevens, ASX managing director and CEO said: “this is an exciting day”, to analysts and journalists last Thursday, he wasn’t kidding. The ASX had effectively announced that it would become the first stock exchange in the world to use distributed ledger technology for messaging and backoffice transactions. The ramifications for fund managers, their… [Read More…]

Global funds transaction network Calastone – the largest messaging system provider of its type – will be migrating its technology onto a full blockchain-enabled infrastructure. The Calastone network connects more than 1,300 financial service organisations across 34 global markets processing over A$142 billion of trades and seven million messages each month. Calastone believes it will… [Read More…]

Morningstar remains upbeat about Australian-based global equities manager Magellan despite a recent spate of senior staff exits including the departure last week of head of research, Nikki Thomas. As well as Thomas, a 10-year Magellan veteran, the manager has seen head of macro research, Sam Churchill, and head of healthcare, Ted Alexander, leave since this… [Read More…]

Auckland-headquartered fund administrator MMC has expanded from its back-office base rolling out a series of new “investor facing” applications. In its latest newsletter released last week, MMC says three new clients have signed up for the group’s ‘investor portal’ joining the two firms that have been using the service since it launched this June. “The… [Read More…]

With NZ on the cusp of introducing personalised ‘robo advice’ solutions, potential suppliers of the service must carefully evaluate their strategies, a new white paper says. The Mosaic Financial Services Infrastructure ‘Bot or Not?’ report released last week, says prospective digital advice (DA) providers ranging from large institutions to boutique advisory firms should base their… [Read More…]

The mature global equity bull market could celebrate one last blast of exuberance in 2018 before finally succumbing to old age late in the year, Russell Investments says in its latest annual outlook. According to the Russell ‘2018 Global Market Outlook’, stretched valuations, central bank tightening, and “long in the tooth” fundamentals suggest a correction… [Read More…]

A new paper argues the institutional manager mandate is due for a redesign to meet the aims of long-term investors. The Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLT) Global report released last week says the mandate rewrite would update a range of standard terms and conditions including fees, benchmarks and reporting to better align the… [Read More…]

Mercer has topped US$200 billion in its global multi-manager business for the first time. In a release last week, Kylie Willment, Mercer CIO Pacific, said the group’s ‘delegated solutions’ business – or a manager-bundling product known as ‘implemented consulting’ – had grown to about US$213 billion sourced from a diverse range of global clients after… [Read More…]

Early next year the Financial Markets Authority (FMA) stands ready to welcome the first generation of fully-personalised (but potentially dehumanised) financial advice robots to NZ shores. But what are the bots going to do when they get here? And how should the (potentially human) NZ financial services industry respond to the automated challengers when they… [Read More…]