European pensions in Korea?

CFA Korea Society has been so kind to invite me to talk to them about pan-European pensions and the conclusions to be drawn from European experience in the light of the very recent introduction of occupational pensions in Korea. Here are the slides of that presentation.

Conference presentation

A few days ago, I've had the honour to address the first IASCF conference in Asia in Singapore with a presentation about the CFA Institute's Comprehensive Business Reporting Modell in its final version.

Occupational pensions in Switzerland

The Federal Office of Statistics has published key figures about occupational pensions in Switzerland. Unfortunately, the latest numbers available date back to 2005. Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that the 2nd pillar's assets have grown to over CHF 540 bio by 2005. That's 117% of GNP. Since 2000, the number of iorps has declined by 19% to 2770. The average number of members per iorp is just shy of 1200.

These statistics have several deficiencies. Available numbers are not timely. Furthermore, we know little about the effective structure of overall liabilities, nor about interest rate sensitivities of assets.

CFA Pension Code of Conduct

The CFA Institute Centre is asking for comments on its Code of Conduct for Members of a Pension Scheme Governing Body until 15 August. The draft has been prepared with the assistance of the OECD and major trade associations from the Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Switzerland, the UK and the USA.

Analysts still unaware of XBRL

The CFA Centre has just given us a preliminary review of 2007 XBRL awareness survey results. From this preliminary review, it is not clear which subset of members have been sampled (yours truly cannot remember having been on it), or what the response ratio was, but a number of interesting points arise, especially in comparison with the results of the May 2006 quick survey.

The majority of analysts is still unaware of XBRL. The percentage reported is even greater than last year, but that's pretty certainly within the margin of error.

Analysts think the convergence of taxonomies - in line with the convergence of reporting standards, presumably - is very important.

Analysts value increasing information granularity, even of details included in footnotes. Just tagging the note will not do.

Analysts are wary of X, i.e. the eXtensibility in so far as they think that preparers' ability to extend the taxonomy ought to be limited and should follow a strict protocol.

As the number of XBRL-aware respondents to the survey (ca. 240) seems to have been quite small, the validity of the answers to the more specific questions may have to be taken with a grain of salt.