How to Win Back Investor Trust

Financial scandals, poor returns, and high fees have damaged investors’ view of fund managers – here’s how to regain it.

Trust between investors and asset managers has been destroyed by the transactional nature of the investment industry, according to John Kay, visiting Professor of Economics at the LSE.

Speaking at the Russell Investments Annual Pensions Conference, Kay said: “Relationships are personal and formed on the basis of trust, whereas transactions and trading exist in an environment of seeking advantage and suspicion. Participants know more about what other traders are doing than about companies these days.”

Kay was also critical of reams of new regulation being forced on the markets, calling the recent regulatory pushes “wrong-headed” and “flawed”.

“All our experience of regulation of other industries tells us that behavioural regulation just diminishes trust and proliferates complexity.”

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Why should we care about a lack of trust? Because the results of maintaining the status quo will be worse and more frequent crises, according to Kay.

“The view that systemic crises, such as Tulip Mania, the South Sea Bubble, the Great Depression and the high-tech boom and bust, are inevitable misses the point that crises are becoming more frequent and larger in amplitude.

“I fear that we will move from crisis to crisis, driven by the disfunctionality of financial services,” he said.

To solve the problem, financial services must become more stream-lined, with fewer intermediary chains for transactions, or as Kay put it “a world in which there are one or at most two intermediaries between savers and borrowers”.

If that all sounds a bit gloomy, that’s because it is. But fear not, UK asset managers, for the Investment Management Association (IMA) has got your back.

On June 5, the IMA’s annual Mansion House dinner sought to reassure fund managers that at least in London, asset managers were starting to regain any trust lost during the financial crisis.

Douglas Ferrans, chairman of the IMA, said the first step was to reconnect with investors and understand what they need and how best to serve those needs.

“The second is to demonstrate why we deserve their trust and confidence,” he continued.

“We need to ensure that when we spend our clients’ money, we do so with real skill and diligence. We must ensure that when we face issues that give rise to potential conflicts of interest, we are able to think independently and put our clients’ interests first.”

Talking about how the industry tackles the challenge of effective engagement with companies in which it invests, Ferrans said: “There is a very mixed approach in this area among investment management firms. The challenges in effective engagement are well-known and I have in the past defended the right of our firms and clients to decide how far down this path they individually go.

“However, as an industry, this is an area that cannot and should not be ignored.”

So, become more streamlined or become touchy-feely and listen to your clients? Ultimately, aiCIO suspects how asset managers go about regaining trust will boil down to how much they have to spend.

Calling All Asset Managers: The Dutch Are Ready For DC

One of the Netherlands’ biggest insurers backs a shift towards defined contribution.

(June 6, 2013) — Aegon has claimed new requirements for Dutch pension funds to re-write their contracts by the end of the year will result in a surge to defined contribution (DC).

A bit of background: With more than €1 trillion in the sector, the Dutch pensions market is one of the world’s largest, but up until now it’s been predominantly defined benefit (DB) orientated.

But these DB plans presently offer only partially conditional, non-indexed pensions, where indexation can be postponed, and payments can be lowered.

Dutch employers and trade unions agree that the current pension premium level has reached a peak and to keep them at the current level, either the nominal certainty or the indexation of pensions has to be weakened.

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For this reason, the Dutch government has proposed a new contract, due to be passed into legislation at the end of this year.

Employers will be asked whether they want to offer Defined Ambition (DA) pensions–where contributions will become fixed and pension rights, benefits and targeted retirement age will become automatically adjusted in line with life expectancy–or derisk their current DB pensions by transferring to insured DB using buy-outs and moving to DC pensions for the future.

Insurers can only offer DB currently as they operate under different regulations to pension funds, although players such as Aegon are lobbying the government hard to let them offer DA contracts too.

DC can only be offered through Premium Pension Institution (PPI) providers. At present, there are already 15 PPI providers in the Netherlands and it is estimated that close to 1,000 companies have already moved to the PPI.

Sales opportunities aside (Aegon has four PPI offerings), Aegon’s Lex Solleveld, a proposition manager, for the Dutch arm of the firm, makes a strong argument for the tide finally turning towards DC in the Netherlands.

“There are already signs of unrest within the Dutch social model, as younger generations are starting to express dissatisfaction with risk-sharing with older generations,” he wrote in a whitepaper on the subject.

“The move from current DB pensions may encourage many companies to step away completely from the collective model in order to adopt individual DC. The creation of the PPI has led to the rapid development of lower cost, well designed DC plans, and the uptake of these plans has been significant.

“For multinational companies, the PPI in particular offers opportunities for further cross-border developments. Whichever path companies choose in the coming years, they will have a fixed pension budget, while the trade-off between certainty and ambition will be made by the participants, either collectively or as individuals.”

Aegon’s not the only one banging the DC drum–aiCIO spoke to Folkert Pama, chairman of the executive board for BeFrank, a DC administration platform with 15,000 members.

“Several things will drive the shift to DC,” he said. “The ageing population, low interest rates, and pension funds getting in trouble with their coverage ratios. The guarantees they’ve given are too expensive, so companies pay most of the pensions premiums-now they’re looking for another way to reduce the cost of their pensions.”

Pama agreed with Aegon’s Solleveld that a generational shift and the attitudes the younger savers have towards their retirement savings would also kick-start DC’s growth. “We’ve now got a whole new generation who think differently about their retirement.

“The current system is about taking care of your employee until he’s dead; we see that shifting to an employer saying I’ll reward you for your work with a wage, some deferred pay to put towards some of your pension, and what you do with that contribution is your problem.”

The biggest challenge for the future of Dutch DC is the asset managers however. Many of the houses are still wedded to their DB clients, and are sceptical about DC becoming a savings superpower.

Pama believes asset managers are dragging their feet because they like the status quo. “Asset managers and board members of DB pension funds are fond of their current situation. They are in charge of billions of euros and they want to stay in charge,” he told aiCIO.

“What they don’t see is that all the big administrators for the pension funds like APG, PGGM and so on, are setting up DC administrations. Why would they do that if they don’t believe DC’s coming?”

As with the UK market, it seems fund managers will only become interested in managing DC money when the pot sizes leap from the millions into the billions.

Read Aegon’s white paper here, and look out for more on the future of the Netherlands’ pensions industry in aiCIO‘s country profile feature, published in the next edition.

Related News: DC: Not as Bad as We Might Think and Finding the Sweet Spot for DC Diversification  

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