Twenty Third Floor
Technical Business Advantage

According to a Fin24 story this morning, the FSB is probing smaller unit trusts.

The economics of a fund manager depends entirely on growing funds under management so that revenues (based on assets under management) grow to be larger than costs (significantly fixed and at most semi-variable). Details of performance fees and the second order impact of investment performance aside, a successful fund manager must attract positive net client cashflow, and lots of it.

Half the 960 available unit trusts have less than R100m in AUM. Some of these may be rapidly growing new funds, but many have been stagnant with slow growth for several years.

The FSB’s attention presents opportunities for consolidation between funds and should place larger funds in a stronger position competitively. Total Expense Ratios (TER) for these funds with significant scale should already be lower than smaller funds. Maybe it’s time the larger funds made more if their size and cost efficiencies. If they are going to take the heat for being too large to be nimble, they might as well reap the benefits too.

It will be interesting to see what this means for white labelled funds and whether the economics of these convince the regulator that they should survive.

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Sharemax appears to be spiralling to its doom. Multiple stories today report that they are late on dividend payments to investors and may not be able to pay dividends in the forseeable future.

Cash has run out. The overvalued, over-geared properties cannot support the income stream that was demanded from them.

No surprises here then.

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Lightstone have a trick up their sleeves. Their raison d’être is collecting, analysing, understanding and packaging data for themselves and others to use to understand past, current and future property valuations.

Their housing price index is more robust (and more independent) than those of the banks based off their own data and target markets. Rather than consider only the average price of houses sold in that particular month (which is a function of house price growth / decline but also how the type, condition, size and location of the houses sold that month differ from the prior month and year) they consider repeat sales where the same property has been bought and sold more than once.

This data is combined or “chain-linked” to provide a continuous measure of house price inflation over time.

House Price Inflation 2010 source: lightstone.co.za

The result of all of this data, best-in-class methodology and analysis? When Lightstone says “opportunities abound in local market” I actually listen. Since their business model is to sell information, I’m more likely to trust what they say.

Fin24 has a story outlining how the South African art market has been struggling. Seems that art, like many other alternative investments, has rather more Beta or systematic risk buried inside the arty exterior and isn’t as good a diversifier as claimed.

update 7 April 2009

The FT is also running a story showing art prices plunging in the first quarter.

The Mei Moses index, set for release on Tuesday, shows art prices fell 35 per cent in the first quarter, having held up during earlier months of the financial crisis.

The worst year on record for art investors was 1991, when prices dropped 41 per cent, said Mr Moses, who has collected data going back to the 1800s.

The index providers added that the art market tended to track the state of the economy but with a time lag.

None of this says that art can’t be a good investment, but the systematic risk involved is still high.

In my previous post I discussed some of the risks to various currencies.

Now what happens if your local currency is pegged to the US Dollar as it is in Lebanon? Speaking to Lebanese bankers and insurers there seems to be a devout belief  that the peg is rock solid.  This is surprising given the history of the Lebanese Pound (LBP) over the last 30 years. Decades of civil war and hyperinflation decimate a currency.

photo credit: austinevan

Now if you offer insurance policies denominated in USD or LBP, accepting premiums and paying benefit in currencies assumed always to be pegged at a fixed  rate you might want to consider what assets you have backing those policies. USD policies backed with assets in LBP (and LBP policies backed with USD assets) are a massive currency risk. The probability of a break in the peg may be small, but the result could be catastrophic.

Unfortunately, it is arguably worse. Even if the USD policies are backed with USD deposits and bonds at Lebanese banks, how will the banks fare if the currency is devalued? How about if the USD does plummet on the back of inflation concerns in the US economy and the LBP is forced to be revalued upwards? Unless the banks are managing this currency risk themselves and are appropriate matched the contagion of currency problems will flow through banks and straight to insurance companies.

Now is not the time to assume that artificial links will remain no matter what happens to the global economy. This is a massive currency risk.

The Fed joins Bank of England and Bank of Japan in repurchasing government bonds.

photo credit: amber.kennedy

This actions (quantitative easing) increases the prices of bonds (more demand, diminishing supply) pushing down long-term yields.

Great if you own bonds, not so great if you are an insurer with imperfectly matched long-term liabilities. Given how difficult it is to find assets of sufficiently long term to back long-dated annuities, many insurers may find themselves with assets of shorter duration than liabiltiies. More losses for insurers could follow.

Insurers have started using swaps to match their annuity portfolios, or to simply increase the duration of their assets such that the sensitivity of assets and liabilities to overall changes in the level of the yield curve has a limited effect. This solves part of the problem. When short term interest rates are affected  by desperate monetary policy and longer term yields are set by a perfect storm of future inflationary expectations, recession fears and now central bank intervention in the markets, matching key durations is a minimum requirement not to have large swings in surplus assets.

And this doesn’t even consinder the impact on Guaranteed Annuity Options and Variable Annuities in the US. More fun.

It is entirely possible that I was too optimistic. For once. What I said was:

Our house prices will decline further but (political meltdown excepted) I’d bet serious money that we won’t see these declines in 2009 or 2010.

I was talking about the 12.4% decline in US house prices in 2008 and the areas with declines greater than 50%. Now I still don’t expect this as a most likely scenario, but a little more evidence is showing that the possibility exists.

According to Realestate web story:

• Alliance Group, who oversee distressed house sales, indicate that distressed property sales have jumped alarmingly
• The Alliance Group believes negative housing equity – where your home is worth less than you owe on it – is now most probably at 1 in 15 South African homes.
• The Alliance Group Distressed Asset Index tracks mortgage stress, which it has defined as mortgage holders who have been in arrears for two months or less. Mortgage stress has sharply increased from 75 000 in the third quarter of 2008 to 130 000 in the last quarter of the year.

According to a Business Day story:

• Relating to a particular set of auctions “Yields which were 10% last year are now 13%.â€?.  In the absence of signficant rental increases, this implies around a 23% decline in house prices.  Even with a 10% increase in rental this implies a 13% decline in house prices.

Ok, so these are just a few anecdotal stories and perspectives from a couple of market players. However, it is clear that not all is well in the property market.

Moneyweb has an article describing the failure of the South African insurance industry to provide insurance to the wider population, including lower income markets such as the banking sector has done.

There are some interesting points to discuss here, and I’m certainly not saying the industry could not do more. However, there are some fairly fundamental social, pyschological and technical reasons that need to be overcome first. I’ve repeated some comments on the article below. I don’t claim this to be an exhaustive list, but I suggest that it lists some more likely suspects for the causes of imperfect penetration of the insurance market.

Sorry Felicity, but this article doesn’t even get into the details and shows a lack of understanding of the drivers of the need for insurance, and the perceived need for insurance.

Life Insurance
Comparing insurance to banking is disingenuous. Transactional banking makes your life easier, now. Basic savings account can work towards short-term goals. Life insurance will always seem less pressing.

1. Savings products will not work for lower income policyholders through an insurance policy because of the assumed average tax rate of 30%. It is a good deal for welathy investors in high marginal tax brackets, but awful for poor people. This is a function of the tax system not the insurers.
2. Life insurance requires payment of a premium now for a possible future benefit to dependents. There is no way this will ever be a priority need. This is human nature. Even if policies are sold, they will be lapsed very quickly and “better” uses are found for the premiums.
3. Lower income market segments typically have greater reliance on extended family for support. Thus, the need is lower for insurance. This is typical of developing countries, and declines as wealth and education increase (along with smaller families, later first children and less support from the extended family).

4. Funeral insurance may be sold through non-traditional outlets, but it is still exactly life insurance. Just that here the need is better appreciated and understood. Therefore it sells. Or do you want insurers to sell products for which there isn’t a need. (hey, easy on the comments that they already do… I don’t think insurers are angels!)
5. Credit life is required to protect the lenders from the death of the borrower. Again, there is a clear need and this form of insurance is quite widespread. Incidentally, funeral insurance and credit life are, unfortunately, typically quite profitable business lines. This might be a better line of attack against the insurance industry.
6. Insurance in South Africa has remarkably high penetration as measured by insurance premiums as a percentage of GDP and compared to other countries. This shows the succes of the industry, and also explains the limited growth prospects. Life insurance is typically less prevalent than short-term insurance in developing economies – if the problem isn’t restricted to South Africa maybe we should look for broader reasons?

7. I know several insurers who are targeting lower income markets with mixed success. The typical complaint against insurers is that they are overly profit-seeking. If (if!) this is true, then one can’t also complain that they aren’t following up on profitable opportunities? Again, maybe the reason is broader than you’ve implied.

Short-term insurance
Several other commentors have already described valid reasons for why short-term insurance take-up is lower than might be hoped. In many countries, third party liability cover is a legal requirement to drive a vehicle, and with good reason. This is the case in Lebanon, another country where I understand a bit about the insurance industry.

Losses on equity portfolios for our short-term insurers don’t really translate to a requirement to provide insurance to new markets. Maybe it suggests a requirement for less reliance on equity bull markets for performance in good years.

Short-term insurance in South Africa would be considered competitive by most standards. If there were large, profitable, untapped markets out there (with sufficient volumes, limited fraud and low enough claims frequencies and severities to make the premiums affordable to the target market) I expect they would be aggressively pursued. The thing about third party liability cover is that it isn’t greatly a function of the value of your vehicle. That makes it relatively expensive compared with the value of a car typical of a lower income target market. Being insured against someone else’s costs, when you would have no way to pay them otherwise and therefore it would be pointless to be sued, doesn’t sound like a very likely expenditure item.

The expenses of adminstering a policy are also not related to the size of policy or the value of insured property. One can argue whether current efficiency levels are right, but that is a separate argument (and one likely to suggest job cuts…).

The propotion of South Africans with short-term insurance should also be compared against those with sufficient assets to make it sensible. Direct comparisons against the populatio as a whole are close to meaninless.

Ok, I think I have done more than enough rambling and ranting. However, let me conclude with one observation on a quote from the article:

“And the plain fact is that local insurers have done way too little to develop products that offer value for the vast majority of South Africans. This is self-evident; precious few South Africans use insurance products.”

Just saying something is a fact doesn’t make it a fact. And please don’t abuse “self-evident”. Just because one item could be a cause of something does not make it the cause, or the only cause, or the primary cause. Especially not when you have just laid out a few of the reasons I also covered as to why insurance is a hard sell.

I wonder whether I should have mentioned the bad debts on house and car loans that are stacking up based (only partially!!) on pressure to lend to households with little wealth for large deposits and strained financials?