DB and DC plans: Strengthening their delivery: Global challenges post credit crunch.

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Global fund distribution - Bridging new frontiers: The evolution of the global market for UCITS funds.

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Convergence and Divergence: New forces shaping the investment universe.

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Globalisation Of Funds - Challenges and Opportunities.

This report discusses whether globalisation has enhanced fund managers’ capabilities to do cross-border business, and any effects on bottom-line benefits. It also examines the ways in which businesses are run on the ground.

Fund managers have rapidly ventured abroad in this decade in search of new clients and higher returns. Has the pace of this expansion accelerated as pension restrictions are lifted in emerging economies and pension clients increasingly want all-inclusive global mandates? Are retail clients more interested in funds with universal themes, and is new wealth generation creating the opportunity for more retail clients around the world to invest?

The report concludes with recommendations on how senior managers can minimise the inherent tensions in their transnational aspirations by implementing a strategic performance process that promotes integration, innovation and accountability that are central to a vibrant global funds business.

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Towards enhanced business governance. Causes and consequences in global investment

This report represents the condensed views of senior executives in 192 investment firms based in 25 countries, with US$21 trillion of assets.

Their views focus on why business governance has become increasingly important for their region and for their business. Although improved business governance has produced benefits for fund managers, the proliferation of regulation across the globe risks acting against client interests. The study shows that over two in every five fund managers have adopted a variety of business principles that promote better conduct of business. These have been embedded into structures, behaviours and cultures that regulate all activities in the front, middle and back offices.

We hope you will find the report useful in order to benchmark your current compliance strategy against the research results. It also includes a reality checklist to help draw out the core components of an ‘ideal’ governance model.

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Tomorrow's Products for Tomorrow's Clients

Unless there is further innovation, clients will be unwilling to buy new products from their fund managers.

This report represents the views of three hundred fund managers and pension funds in 37 countries accounting for US$30 trillion of assets. The study found that clients want absolute returns and liability matching products backed by a value-for-money fee structure that separates returns attributed to managers’ skills from those attributed to market changes.

Asset managers are producing such products. Yet clients in institutional and retail markets are not rushing out to buy them, nor are they likely to in large numbers. This is because clients require improvements that make these products less risky, less volatile, more transparent, more liquid, more simple and more customised.

The report argues that meeting the client needs over the rest of this decade will drive asset managers into significant alliances involving activities in front, middle and back offices. This fragmentation will occur alongside further consolidation which will focus on acquiring skills or extending geographical reach in search of new assets.

For individual asset managers, three business basics will drive success: a good track record, alignment with client interests, and organisational stability that raises the probability of replicating past successes.

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Comply & Prosper: Managing people risk arising from regulation

Mounting regulation is a way of life. Since 1998, around 30 new laws have been passed on business conduct, governance and employment. They directly affect fast growing financial & professional services that underpin London’s status as Europe’s premier business centre.

For individual businesses, regulation has proved a double-edge sword: blind adherence can stifle innovation; loose compliance can mean prosecution.

The key is to avoid both by understanding the nature of risks and implementing processes that encourage enterprise, on the one hand, and minimise bureaucracy on the other.

The issue is two fold: how to have intelligent laws and how to apply them cost effectively such that the UK can be classed as ‘the best regulated country’ in the world of finance and professions. This theme will be addressed by prominent business leaders and HR professionals.

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Hedge Funds: A catalyst reshaping global investment

Since the onset of the bear market, the growth of hedge funds has been nothing short of spectacular. They have become a formidable force; but their lackluster performance since the latter half of 2004 has sparked a debate about their long term future. This report presents the analysis and conclusions emerging from the most comprehensive and broadly based research study ever carried out on the future of hedge funds.

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Raising the Performance Bar: challenges facing global investment management in the 2000s

Our 2003 research showed that only a minority of investment managers around the world had expected the recent bear market to prevail beyond 2002. As a result, substantive corrective actions to arrest a headlong decline in profitability were deemed unnecessary by many. Further market routs in February 2003, however, unleased a wave of actions: some aimed to cut costs immediately, some to boost the top line in the medium term.

Accordingly, this report aims to identify:

		The nature and scale of these changes
		The extent to which they are reshaping the contours of the industry
		Their impact so far on profitability
		Specific areas where progress is vital if a vibrant industry is to emerge from the traumas of the last four years

Harnessing workforce Diversity to Raise the Bottom Line

This important report highlights the vital importance of inclusion and diversity and also acts as a practical guide for managing them to best advantage. Its aims are:

		to highlight employers' recent initiatives towards creating a more diverse and inclusive workforce
		to uncover the nature of the forces that are driving these initiatives
		to underline good practices and the lessons learnt from them
		to provide an assessment of their impacts on business performance
		to identify the constraints that need to be overcome for better impacts
		to recommend actions that companies need to take to overcome the constraints

Revolutionary Shifts, Evolutionary Responses: Global Investment Management in the 2000s

The continuing bear market of 2003 exposed the fault lines and shattered customer confidence, yet many investment managers have done little beyond cost cutting and product diversification, according to a global study by the think tank CREATE and KPMG, the professional services firm.

Investment performance, fee levels, operational transparency and service quality are coming under scrutiny like never before. The shift from balanced to specialist mandates is forcing firms to focus their capabilities in fewer products and activities. The long prevailing tension between manufacturing and distribution has become more acute. Economies of scale have been slow to kick in. These are some of the findings from a study of 185 investment managers in 20 countries, who collectively manage 19.8 trillion Euros.

The study argues that:

		investment managers need to use those lean production tools that have revolutionised other industries which suffered over-capacity and falling profits
		they have the potential to change the culture of excessive individualism and over-inflated compensation still associated with the craft of investment.

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Tomorrow's Organisation: New Mindsets, New Skills