News
FOCUS - Winter 2003/4
Introduction - By Dean Brown
Welcome to the Winter edition of focus, the quarterly Performa newsletter containing updates on the latest industry events, developments in the world of GIPS and enhancements to the products and services that Performa provide.
Within the UK Investment Performance Standards (UKIPS) is an appendix entitled "Guidance for assessing managers' performance presentations" which contains suggested questions that trustees and other investors should ask of their investment managers. One that I remember well was: "Does the firm comply with GIPS or UKIPS? If not, why not?". This same question, in a slightly different context, was raised at two recent Performance Conferences; the Asia Business Forum (ABF) in Singapore and the recent Performance, Attribution and Risk Management (PARM) event in London. At PARM, Oliver Dräger of ABN AMRO in Germany highlighted the increase in this type of question in German RFP's. Does this signify that GIPS has finally been accepted as a necessary part of the investment and marketing process, or simply suggest that GIPS is still just the preferred route to take? Twenty-two countries have now adopted GIPS or a derivative of it. With the forthcoming release of Gold GIPS for industry comment, are we finally seeing the fruition of AIMR's 1993 goal of a single standard that has both acceptance and recognition on a global scale? I would suggest that we are almost there but, as with most things, only time will tell.
I would like to thank Simon Willcox for his article entitled "The importance of GIPS to Third Party Performance Providers". Simon's broad experience and expertise highlight further the strong reasons for the whole investment management industry to support the Standards.