RBC Dexia Investor Services has launched a liability benchmarking tool to help plan sponsors align their assets and liabilities.
“Our objective liability benchmarking service provides sponsors with an important tool to help monitor their ability to pay their pensioners,” says Fay Coroneos, head, risk and investment analytics, with RBC Dexia. “Making this tool available to our pension clients helps them deal with one of their major challenges and underscores RBC Dexia’s commitment to defined benefit pension plan sponsors.”
RBC Dexia uses a library of investable Canadian bonds to create a customized liability proxy that reflects a pension plan’s unique risk preference and cash outflows, which eliminates the need for assumptions. According to the company, the more common, but less precise, duration-matching or “representative benchmark” approaches rely heavily on assumptions around discount rates and plan liability profiles.
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Investor confidence neutral
The State Street Investor Confidence Index—based on the buying and selling patterns of institutional investors—rose slightly in January.
Globally, investor confidence rose 0.2 points to 104.5 from a revised December level of 104.3. North American investors displayed the greatest confidence—up 4.4 points over December’s reading of 103.5—to settle at 107.9, while Europeans shed 5.6 points to 98.9 from the December level of 104.5. Asian institutional investors posted a slight increase in confidence to 98.1 from a level of 97.5 in December.
“Institutional investors had a number of competing claims on their attention this month,” says Harvard University professor Ken Froot, co-developer of the index. “Impressive growth numbers out of China for 2009 buttress anecdotal evidence that expansion continues apace there, lending a positive tone to a number of asset classes. At the same time, there is some evidence that while activity has picked up to a substantial degree in the developed markets, the recent pace of improvement may be difficult to sustain, all the more so against a backdrop of uncertainty around monetary policy and regulatory change more generally.”
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CIBC Mellon wins asset servicing mandate for Canada Council for the Arts
CIBC Mellon Global Securities Services Company has been selected by the Canada Council for the Arts to deliver global custody and accounting services for the Council’s Endowments and Special Funds and its Killam Investment Funds.
“Our goal was to find an asset servicing provider that could help us enhance the efficiency of our investment process so we could concentrate on continuing to provide the best services to the Canadian artistic community,” says Carole Boileau, head, finance, Canada Council for the Arts. “We chose CIBC Mellon because one of its many great capabilities is its reporting technology, which is flexible, customizable and user-friendly. By using this technology, we will be able to manage our funds even more efficiently.”
“CIBC Mellon is proud to support the asset servicing needs of the Canada Council for the Arts—an organization that is dedicated to contributing to the positive growth and development of communities across Canada,” says David Linds, senior vice-president, business development and client relationship management, with CIBC Mellon. “We are pleased to help the Canada Council for the Arts and all of our institutional clients enhance their investment processes by introducing new efficiencies and delivering customized and innovative solutions.”