April 2023

$2 Billion Loss at Sweden’s Pension Fund Has Stocks Chief Put on Leave

Sweden’s biggest pension fund Alecta has put its equities chief on leave and announced a plan to reduce risk exposure after reporting $2 billion in investment losses tied to last month’s US banking crisis. On Tuesday, Alecta said it would scale back large stakes in companies far from its home market and named Ann Grevelius as acting head of equity portfolio management. Liselott Ledin, the equities chief responsible for making Alecta one of the largest shareholders in Silicon Valley Bank...

‘Pensions have done more than most for ESG but it’s time for more action’

If the recent Treasury sub-committee on financial services regulations ("Greenwashing: sustainability disclosure requirements") is anything to go by, there remain far too many people in and around financial services who think we are doing a good job addressing sustainability challenges. We are not. Clients are confused, and despite pockets of excellence, sustainability challenges are getting worse not better. And neither of these will be addressed by investors sidelining real world problems or inciting ambulance chasing. Conflating welcome mass-market improvements, like entry level...

March 2023

BlackRock calls on clients to rethink hedging strategy after UK pension crisis

BlackRock's liability-driven investment business is urging some smaller UK pension fund clients to stop splitting assets across multiple managers, as it tries to cut the complexity and risks of a strategy that imploded last year. Asset managers worry new rules to make LDI investing more robust could render the strategy unviable for some schemes, but consultants warn BlackRock's push could repel pension clients who want to minimise concentration risk. LDI, a hedging strategy used by thousands of schemes to ensure their...

US. Pension Risk Transfers Spiked in 2022 due to Higher Interest Rates, Report Shows

Rising interest rates drove increased pension risk transfer activity in 2022, as these transactions totaled $52 billion in premiums last year—the highest total in the decade Aon has been tracking the information, according to a recent report. A total of 568 pension risk transfer transactions were made last year, with IBM headlining this activity by completing a $16 billion retiree lift-out in September  2022. This was the second-largest PRT transaction in U.S. history, Aon’s U.S. Risk Transfer report for March...

Pension Administration in Nigeria: Lessons and Reflections

By Opeyemi Naimot Dawodu In every democratic society, from the jurisprudential perspective, there are certain ideals that must be present one of which is social justice. These ideals are aspirations and the nearer a society is to these aspirations, the better the society is. In a country like Nigeria, pension is one of the social objectives in partial fulfillment of the ideals present in Chapter 2 of the 1999 Constitution of Nigeria (as amended 2011) and as such how this...

Pensions and the Nordic Welfare Model

By Torben M. Andersen Within the frame of the Nordic welfare model, pension system design has taken very different routes. While the overall aims in terms of distribution and replacement rates are similar, the division of labour between defined benefit and contribution as well as pay-as-you-go versus funded schemes differs significantly. The main characteristics of the pension systems in the Nordic countries are presented, and outcomes relating to pension adequacy in terms of poverty and replacement rates are discussed. Specific...

Hackers breach U.K. Pension Protection Fund, steal employee data

Hackers obtained data on some employees of the U.K.'s Pension Protection Fund after exploiting a third-party data transfer service, according to a fund spokesperson. The Pension Protection Fund manages £39 billion of assets for its 295,000 members, according to its website. The fund protects people with a defined benefit pension when an employer becomes insolvent. By exploiting the Go Anywhere transfer service, intruders compromised some employee data, Jenny Peters, a spokesperson for the fund, said in a statement. The hackers were...

Britain says it won’t ditch global accounting rule to unlock pensions cash

Britain on Wednesday played down the possibility of diverging from a globally-set accounting rule which some lawmakers blame for encouraging pension schemes to prefer low risk government bonds over stock markets. City minister Andrew Griffith in February said a global accounting rule needed reviewing as it had become a "performance penalty" which trapped cash in pension schemes which otherwise could be invested in companies and the economy. The so-called IAS 19 rule requires company defined benefit pension schemes to "mark to...

Sweden’s Biggest Pension Fund Loses $2 Billion in US Bank Crises

Sweden’s largest pension fund, Alecta, is facing losses of almost $2 billion as a result of a failed investment strategy that made it one of the biggest shareholders in two collapsed US banks and another that is embroiled in the ongoing banking crisis. The scale of the losses has become clearer since the private pension group sold all of its First Republic Bank stake at a loss of 7.5 billion kronor ($728 million), according to Chief Executive Officer Magnus Billing....

U.S. General Accountability Office probing collapse of St. Clare’s pension fund

The U.S. Government Accountability Office, an investigative arm of Congress, is probing the alleged mismanagement of a depleted pension fund that wiped out retirement plans for more than 1,100 former employees of the now-closed St. Clare's Hospital in Schenectady. State Assemblyman Angelo Santabarbara disclosed the federal investigation on Wednesday and said he learned of it this week during a meeting with staff members with the House Committee on Education and Workforce. They had met "to discuss potential federal solutions regarding...