European pension assets up 5.7% to euro3.7trn
Market turbulence and its effect on the global economy have overshadowed pension fund performance in the past year. The downturn, which came less than five years after the end of the last market crisis, has both had a negative impact on returns and forced many pension funds to re-examine their asset allocation and solvency levels.
This is one of the elements reflected in the latest annual IPE Top 1000 Pension Funds supplement, which focuses on Europe's largest pension funds, and which is published with the September issue of the London-based monthly magazine Investment & Pensions Europe (IPE).
The Top 1000 supplement includes data on the assets under management of the top 750 continental European pension funds, including those in Ireland and Iceland, and the top 250 in the UK. It has been produced yearly since 2000.
The figures show that over the year assets grew to Euro3.7trn, up from the previous year's Euro3.5trn but a slower rate of increase than in recent years.
Over the past year strong inflows have outweighed declines in investment portfolios. Last year's Top 1000 supplement found that pension funds' assets had grown by 16.7%.
This year for the first time the supplement highlights the legislative and regulatory background that underpins the pensions systems of the countries examined.
One of the supplement's highlights is a report by the head of the OECD's private pensions unit, Juan Yermo, on the increasing efforts to better regulate and supervise private pensions as their role in the overall pensions landscape increases.
It also includes an assessment of the challenges ahead for the European pensions industry and what the European Federation of Retirement Provision is doing to help meet them from Chris Verhaegen, the organisation's secretary-general.
Among the trends that emerge from the data are that Europe's two mega funds are continuing to pull away from the others in terms of assets, with Norway's Government Pension Fund - Global, the Norwegian petroleum fund that has been deployed as a financing fund to underwrite the future state pension promise, maintaining the lead it established the previous year over the previous long-standing champion, the Dutch civil service pension fund ABP.
At the other end of the scale there is an increasing number of funds from east and central Europe, formed as a result of a series of pension reforms throughout the region from the 1990s.
IPE has been providing crucial information to and charting the trends in the European investments and pensions industry for 10 years. It is published by IPE International Publishers Ltd, an independent publishing house that also produces the daily news bulletin ipe.com, IPE Real Estate, IP Nederland and IP Asia, which covers the Asian market. It also provides asset management search tool IPE Quest and hosts the annual IPE Awards.
Further information from IPE editor Liam Kennedy on [email protected] and +44 (0)20 7261 4601 or George Coats on [email protected] and +44(0)20 761 4605.
