Surprise! Are managed funds back?
The financial crisis was not fun for Australian fund managers. They did it much tougher than their American and European counterparts, which did not have to compete with 6% term deposit rates. Everyone faced volatile equity markets, but with near zero interest rates, overseas investors had little choice but to seek out returns from growth […]
Read more...ATO’s SMSF pension scare
One of the popular benefits of SMSFs has been their potential to defer capital gains tax forever. By accumulating assets in the accumulation phase, and not realising capital gains until the pension phase when the income tax rate is zero, no CGT ever becomes payable. This is an important practical advantage of SMSFs over collective […]
Read more...Group insurance – prices soar as risks come home to roost
To many in wealth management, group insurance is about as exciting as watching paint dry. But strange things are afoot in the group insurance world which will reverberate across the industry landscape. Many funds with external insurers – especially not-for-profits – have announced premium increases of 30-50% on their life and TPD policies in a […]
Read more...Beyond technology – 6 groups doing interesting things
It’s amazing what you come across in the archives. In the process of preparing for our FSC conference presentation last week, Beyond Technology, we came across today’s diagram, a value chain of the industry around 1995-2005 when it was at the peak of its pricing power. It provides a remarkable comparison to the industry conditions […]
Read more...Consolidation delayed – auto-con kicked into the long grass
One of the goals of Stronger Super is to increase scale in the Australian super system by encouraging, if not forcing, mergers of super funds. The formal part is a self-administered annual test on trustees that their MySuper members are not disadvantaged by a lack of scale in assets or members. It looked vague and […]
Read more...Infrastructure – Australia’s corner of global asset management
Australia punches well above its weight in global pensions, with 20 million people having created a top 5 pension asset market thanks to compulsion. In comparison, Australian asset managers as a group haven’t enjoyed commensurate success. Yes, they dominate Australian equities as an asset class, but it’s low growth in terms of demand for active […]
Read more...Can you buy an industry fund?
It’s a question that just will not die. Can you buy an industry fund? Can you sell one? Who’s the seller anyway? This question has been put to us pretty much every year that Tria has been around. We’ve been asked by retail competitors looking to build market share via acquisition, by stock analysts, and […]
Read more...The apartment sized holes in FoFA
Happy New Financial Year, and that means welcome to the brave new world of FoFA. Now it’s not every day a CEO raises concerns when one of their products is selling really well. So recent worries expressed by BoQ CEO Stuart Grimshaw about the rapid growth of leveraged purchases of real estate by SMSFs, particularly […]
Read more...FoFA preview – how it has reshaped the wealth industry
The next edition of Trialogue will be released into a post-FoFA world. What’s going to look different? FoFA is perhaps the most far-reaching industry reform since compulsory superannuation. It leaves the Stronger Super reforms in the shade; indeed one of the problems of Stronger Super was that FoFA basically stole its thunder (that’s how you […]
Read more...Retail insurance – high hopes and how to realise them
One of the interesting data points of the 2012-13 Tria Super Funds Review is that while net inflows have been holding up in dollar terms, they are increasingly concentrated. 80% of industry net inflow goes to just 20% of the competitors. For the other 80% of competitors, net inflows are getting hard to come by. […]
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