Managed funds research and ratings start-up Foresight Analytics is expanding further in the ultra-competitive retail and advised investment sector through the acquisition of the analytics business of Australia Ratings Group. This follows a tie-up announced earlier this month with Style Analytics Group, a factor analysis firm with offices in Boston and London, which provides research…
BetaShares has taken on a new cornerstone investor, TA Associates, as it enters its second decade in business, with founding partner Mirae Asset Management cashing in its chips. TA is arguably the largest growth-orientated global private equity firm with a specialty in financial services. TA, which has backed managers such as PIMCO and Invesco early…
Mark Arnold and Jason Orthman stood at the podium to collect three awards at last Friday (Feb 26) afternoon’s annual Morningstar funds awards, including the main prize, that of Fund Manager of the Year. But they didn’t quite scoop the pool. They were on stage four times but had to make way for T. Rowe…
PIMCO Australia last night (February 22) warned advisers nationally that its name had been used in bond scams which ASIC uncovered in January. They are “raising millions of dollars”, ASIC said. The scam, targeting Australian investors, involves an offer of unrealistically high returns on the supposed investment in bonds, which the big manager says are…
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…
The switch in focus to retirement incomes, ahead of the introduction of the Retirement Income Covenant, was evident at the annual SMSF Association conference last week. Deborah Ralston said: “Super has been a bit overdone”. Ralston, one of the panellists on the Government’s Retirement Income Review (RIR), which handed down its report in July 2020,…
People talk about the importance of taking the time to build a platform for any endeavour. If that’s the case for developing a commercial mass-market range of retirement solutions, Allianz and PIMCO have given themselves a head start with their platform – Allianz Retire+. Starting in 2015 in PIMCO’s Sydney office, the notion of putting…
It may be a lull between storms but the SMSF Association has no major political battle to contend with at the moment, instead focusing on smaller issues to do with regulatory change and embarking on new research about small funds’ performance in case that becomes an issue in future. John Maroney, the association’s chief executive,…
Milestone Group has extended the rollout of its new pControl asset allocation offering to Asia-Pacific to service increasing demand due to greater complexities of front and middle-office requirements in the use of funds-of-funds and other third-party investment structures. The ‘pControl Asset Allocation’ product is based on the platform built by the Australian-bred global group’s pControl…
When a 25-year-old English fund manager with £21 billion (A$37 billion) under management discloses it had made a sizable investment in bitcoin, it is bound to give the institutionalisation of the cryptocurrency a big kick along. This is especially so when the manager regards bitcoin as a potential store of wealth and not an alternative…
