Mcube Japan has appointed former Sony pension management executive Masakazu Arikawa as President.
Arikawa is retiring from Sony following a 30-year career. Most recently he was President and resident Director of the Sony Global Pension Management Company (SGPM), with responsibility for the coordinated management and policy making for Sony’s global pension funds. He led many key initiatives in this role including the introduction of the Asset Liability management approach within the Japanese context and the introduction of alternatives and currencies to the asset mix.
Arikawa, who graduated from Hitotsubahi University in 1969 with a degree in Economics, is a member of the United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund Investment Committee and was responsible for co-authoring the Japanese text version of ‘Innovations in Pension Fund Management’.
‘We are honoured to have a person of Arikawa san’s stature join our senior management team and further emphasises Meube’s client centric approach to serving the investment management marketplace,’ says Dr Arun Muralidhar, Chairman of Meube Investment Technologies. ‘We have known Arikawa san for a number of years, have worked very closely with him on a number of projects, and are delighted that he is now our colleague in addition to being a friend, advisor and co-researcher.’
Commenting on his new role Arikawa said: ‘It is not often in this industry that one gets an opportunity to work on a business concept as innovative as Mcube’s. I was immediately impressed by how relevant their product AlphaEngine is to the investment manager, and have made it my goal to introduce such disciplined approaches to the Japanese investment managers. Further, their commitment to research and furthering the state-of-the-art in our field appealed to me and where we share very similar goals and viewpoints.’
AlphaEngine is a web-based software that helps make all portfolio decisions using an informed and structured approach. It allows any investor or researcher (pension fund, endowment, foundations, central bank, investment bank research group, fund-of-fund or hedge fund) to evaluate a broad range of investment strategies for any asset class and use these strategies to guide ongoing portfolio decisions (eg tactical asset allocation, style, regional and currency allocation, manager allocations, futures across stocks, bonds, cash, currency and commodities). In addition, the client can customize analyses to their specific portfolio structure, benchmarks and policy constraints. The net impact to most funds is often higher returns, better governance and improved risk management.
Background notes: Mcube Investment Technologies LLC, a US company headquartered in Plano, Texas is a leading developer and provider of decision support products for institutional investment management. Mcube has a strategic alliance with ORTEC Consultants, NL, thereby further broadening the product offering to best-of-breed products in asset-liability management, performance attribution, index tracking and risk modelling. The company currently has a number of other large and small pension funds, endowments, investment banks, hedge fund fund-of-funds and hedge funds as clients.
