Allianz的总问题：不仅仅是邦德王

The early-afternoon air was crisp and clear in Munich on the last Friday in September. The Oktoberfest fair, the city’s annual salute to beer, bratwurst and Bavarian culture, was in full swing, and employees of Allianz Asset Management (AAM), the €1.8 trillion ($2.3 trillion) investment arm of the giant German insurer, were returning from lunch at nearby beer halls with less than their usual haste. Many were already turning their thoughts to the weekend ahead.

Then at 2:30 p.m. the office suddenly turned into an “angry beehive,” as one employee put it. News reports landed on executives’ screens announcing that Bill Gross, the legendary bond king at Pacific Investment Management Co., Allianz’s big, California-based asset manager,Janus Capital Group已被更小的竞争对手被录用。AAM chairman Jay Ralph and his assistants frantically tried to confirm the news with PIMCO executives. It wasn’t even dawn yet nine time zones away in Newport Beach, where PIMCO’s 20-story office tower overlooks a marina on palm-lined Newport Bay. By the time that PIMCO chief executive Douglas Hodge was able to confirm Gross’s departure, some 40 minutes later, Allianz’s share price was plummeting. By day’s end it would drop 6.2 percent, wiping €3.8 billion off the group’s market cap, to €58.2 billion. The shares have continued to fall since then, losing an additional 6.5 percent to close at €119.85 on October 20.

For Europe’s largest insurance company by premiums and market valuation, the setback was devastating. Allianz is widely reputed to be one of the world’s premier risk insurers, yet the company had somehow failed to manage one of its biggest single risks — namely, a chaotic exit by its bond market superstar. The uproar also called into question the Allianz model of combining insurance and asset management in one financial services group.

Gross’s departure wasn’t exactly a surprise. Speculation about his future had swirled around PIMCO ever since the firm’s CEO and co-CIO,穆罕默德·埃尔 - 艾尔那abruptly announced his resignation in January. In the weeks that followed, reports surfaced describing heated clashes over粗略和埃尔 - 埃里安之间的管理风格导致后者的出发。与此同时，PIMCO旗舰总回报基金的表现不佳，该基金占全球最大的债券基金，稳定的救赎流动，总计在16个月内为8月底的680亿美元。总古怪的滑稽怪物，包括在6月份晨局投资会议的主题演讲开始时穿深太阳镜，为火灾增加了更多的燃料。世界各地的投资者开始询问自己对PIMCO的固定收入分配 - 几十年来最安全的决定养老基金经理可以制造 - 仍然是一个好主意。

“始终，我们有继任计划到位，”拉尔夫告诉亚博赞助欧冠in an interview a few days after Gross quit. The company had hoped to resolve the concerns about Gross and stem the outflows at PIMCO by staging an orderly change in leadership, executives tellII。On the last Saturday of September, the 70-year-old Gross would be informed that his reign was over as chief investment officer of the investment company he’d co-founded 43 years ago, although he would be asked to stay on for a transition period while a younger team took the helm. Then on Sunday, Allianz and PIMCO — and, ideally, Gross — would release a soothing statement for the markets before their Monday opening.

But as every investor knows, timing is critical to good execution. Allianz botched it in this case. Getting wind of the plot, Gross jumped ship rather than walk the plank. By quitting PIMCO on Friday, preempting the planned announcement, he ensured maximum impact on the markets before the weekend and minimal time for his former employers to restore a semblance of control. Rather than stemming the tide of redemptions, his sudden departure accelerated the flow, with $23.5 billion pouring out of PIMCO in September, reducing total assets to $1.87 trillion.

“我竞争竞争，我希望能够为我的客户赢得胜利，”在他的新公司的客户介绍的函件中写道。“我期待着在Janus的新座位上为您服务。”

The incident revived long-standing questions about the wisdom of Allianz’s owning an asset manager like PIMCO and whether the German parent could exercise any effective control over its California subsidiary. Executives in Munich insist their strategy is sound. On a conference call with financial analysts three days after the Gross resignation, Allianz chief executive Michael Diekmann asserted that the insurer would maintain full ownership of PIMCO. “The asset management business fits in extremely well with Allianz’s insurance business,” Ralph toldII。“It is just as much a core business as our property/casualty or life insurance segments.” Executives at PIMCO, meanwhile, have been working overtime to reassure investors and persuade them that their new team-oriented approach to managing money will deliver strong returns while avoiding the pitfalls that can befall a star manager. (See “Ivascyn and Company Try to Calm PIMCO Clients with Team Approach”)

Last year asset management — encompassing both PIMCO and €373 billion Allianz Global Investors (AGI), primarily an equity shop — accounted for 30.3 percent of Allianz’s €6.4 billion in net income. But partly as a result of PIMCO’s net outflows, asset management dropped to 22.9 percent of €3.6 billion in net income in the first half of this year. The results would have looked worse if AGI hadn’t delivered net inflows of €5.1 billion. Allianz seems more involved with management at AGI than with PIMCO; the subsidiary serves mainly the European market and is run by lesser egos than Gross.

Insurers differ on the merits of owning asset managers as opposed to outsourcing the investment of their assets. Zurich Insurance Group, Europe’s fifth-largest insurer by premiums, sold most of its asset management business to Deutsche Bank a dozen years ago. Italy’sAssicurazioni Generali那Europe’s No. 3 insurer, manages most of its assets but has managed to attract only a small amount of money from outside clients. France’s AXA, Europe’s second-biggest insurer, follows Allianz’s model most closely: It owns two asset managers —AllianceBernstein和Axa投资经理 - 管理大量集团的资产，并从各种外方吸引业务。

Allianz高管坚持认为，今天的低利率环境和欧洲的偿付能力II指令更繁重的资本要求加强了保险与资产管理之间的联系。这对德国和意大利的人寿保险政策尤其如此，这是该集团的两个最大的市场，保证收入产品占主导地位。这种保证越来越难以融资，因为潜在的债券今天携带这种琐事利率，而偿付能力II要求保险公司对这些担保持有更多风险资本。因此，现在客户经常出售人寿保险政策以及资产管理产品，这些产品具有更高回报的风险。对于Allianz来说，这是拥有资产经理的足够理由。

“为什么不在我们的全面控制下提供服务提供商，以确保质量和性能？”询问最大的Zimmerer，作为Allianz投资管理领袖必须分配资产以匹配保险公司的负债并投资一部分公司的保险费。“Max是我最喜欢的董事会成员，因为他是我们最大的客户，”Quips Ralph。

在6月底,安联委托€306基本脉冲电平lion of its €601 billion in assets to PIMCO and €135 billion to AGI. External firms manage the remaining €160 billion.

Analysts point out that insurers generally prefer to contract the services of outside asset managers to cover the asset-liability management of their insurance business and to invest their profits. Some also assert that because Allianz owns asset managers, its stock suffers from a conglomerate discount. A report issued in September 2013 by Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. estimated that Allianz could have raised €10 billion by floating PIMCO through an initial public offering. “That would have created enormous shareholder value,” says Thomas Seidl, the London-based lead analyst for the report. “But now, of course, after what has happened at PIMCO, it’s too late.”

自从El-Erian的暴风雨离开以来，对PIMCO的担忧遭到酝酿。1月底，Allianz命名霍奇将El-Erian归首席执行官取而代之，并批准了六个副市中心的Pimco预约。这些代表包括丹尼尔·伊万年奇，这是该公司信贷对冲基金的44岁的经理，在总收入后接管了群体CIO。然而，赎回总回报基金继续持续，股东在Allianz发誓。

At the insurer’s annual shareholder meeting, held in May in Munich, dissidents skewered CEO Diekmann for not involving himself more with PIMCO’s management. Daniela Bergdolt, spokeswoman for DSW, Germany’s largest private shareholder association, likened the tiff between Gross and El-Erian to “a male catfight” and told Diekmann, “I would have wished that you had interfered earlier.” Diekmann rejected the suggestions and reminded shareholders that the bond manager had performed admirably over many years without heavy supervision from Munich. “There is really no reason to be hard on us,” he said at the meeting.

拉尔夫说，他的办公室和高管在PIMCO之间的联系方式保持不变。缺乏紧迫性统治较高。Diekmann忽视了主要Allianz股东，包括法兰克福的联盟投资集团，留在首席执行官两年内，以确保PIMCO的问题得到充分解决。Instead, just six days after Gross’s departure, Diekmann announced that he would step down in May, abiding by the Allianz tradition that its chief executives retire at age 60. As expected, his successor will be Oliver Bäte, 49, head of the p/c business. The desire to project Allianz’s image of a steady, well-oiled business group takes precedence over any hint of panicky concern for a flailing subsidiary.

The hands-off approach toward PIMCO may also reflect the fact that the top echelon of Allianz lacks anybody with a strong background in asset management. “Michael Diekmann and Jay Ralph have impressive insurance track records, but asset management and insurance are just fundamentally different business models,” Bernstein’s Seidl says.

In his dozen years as chief executive, Diekmann has strengthened Allianz’s standing as one of the world’s most profitable insurers. Yet the group has lost billions on noncore investments under his leadership, most notably in investment banking. Ralph, a 55-year-old Milwaukee native and certified public accountant, has spent three decades in insurance, including the past 17 years at Allianz. He was head of the firm’s risk transfer operations in Zurich, then led its reinsurance business out of Munich before becoming chairman of AAM in 2012.

The notion that asset management and insurance belong under the same roof became popular among large insurers during the years of heady growth in financial services before the global crisis. Stand-alone insurers were viewed as boring firms with low returns on capital that discouraged shareholders. The smart insurance money chased after brand-name asset managers and investment banks.

安联是最活跃的球员之一。在late 1990s and early 2000s, it acquired nine boutique asset managers, each with expertise in individual asset classes. Besides PIMCO, which Allianz purchased in 2000, some of the more prominent acquisitions were Nicholas-Applegate Capital Management, a growth-oriented equity shop based in San Diego; Oppenheimer Capital, a New York–based firm that manages money for pension funds and high-net-worth individuals; and RCM Capital Management, a San Francisco–based manager of mutual funds and hedge funds for institutional clients. Getting those outfits to work together smoothly for Allianz clients was a struggle, though.

该任务最初被委托给Dresdner Kleinwort Wassersein，Inlianz于2001年购买了240亿欧元，并将德德纳银行更名为Dresdner Bank，返回该实体的根源作为德国的2号商业银行。该交易应该创造德国领先的金融服务提供商，但Dresdner被抓获了一个禁止人的土地：太小而无法与全球投资银行竞争，太大而无法成为一个集中的德国球员。它在非正常贷款和陷入困境的交易收入上造成了多元欧元的损失。Dresdner高管对帮助Allianz整合其精品资产管理人员进行了分心。2008年，Allianz终于将Dresdner销售给Commerzbank€9.8亿欧元 - 比它所支付的少60％。Allianz在销售上拨打了64亿欧元的记下，导致这一年损失为24亿欧元。

“Allianz’s multiboutique approach to asset management went more smoothly only after it got rid of Dresdner,” says Marc Thiele, a London-based equity analyst for Mediobanca Securities. But that was true for only a brief period. Specialist investment boutiques were the rage in the early 2000s, but after the global financial crisis erupted in 2008, clients began to favor large asset managers that could offer multiasset, multistrategy products.

Allianz的精品店发现自己处于独特的劣势。虽然Blackrock可以向客户提出单一，全面的投资解决方案，Allianz必须从其一家精品店，从另一个和相互资金的一个精品店，固定收入证券投入股票资金。“客户可能只有30分钟，其中我们花了太多时间来解释它是如何工作的，”Allianz全球投资者的首席执行官伊丽莎白Corley召回伊丽莎白Corley。“客户告诉我们他们只是不喜欢我们的公司结构。”

So in 2012, Allianz abandoned the multiboutique approach. It left PIMCO alone to handle fixed-income securities, mainly for U.S. investors. AGI, which was created as an in-house investment arm in the late ’90s, absorbed the other boutiques, dealing primarily with equities. Ralph calls the PIMCO-AGI setup the two-pillar model.

They are two very unequal pillars, however. PIMCO was managing nearly four times as much money as AGI at the end of June. It also runs more external money: Third-party mandates accounted for 78 percent of PIMCO’s assets at the end of June, compared with 64 percent for AGI. PIMCO is more institutional (67 percent of assets) and gets 69 percent of its assets from the Americas, with Europe and Asia chipping in 21 percent and 10 percent, respectively. AGI’s third-party assets are evenly balanced between institutional and retail clients; the firm gets 61 percent of its assets from Europe, 30 percent from the Americas and 9 percent from Asia.

直到最近的麻烦PIMCO提供了恒星财务结果，在DRESDNER崩溃后提供了急需的促进。Allianz于2000年在2000年购买了70％的股份，当时Pimco管理了2560亿美元。该公司在以下十年内壮观地增长，从固定收入市场和非凡的表现中受益于繁荣。在毛利下，PIMCO近四十年的基准表现优于90％。他在20世纪70年代开创了积极的固定收入投资，并且是足够的，足以预见到2008年的住房崩溃，避免抵押贷款支持的证券。

But PIMCO’s soaring success didn’t impress many Allianz shareholders. For a decade after PIMCO’s acquisition by Allianz, its original fund managers held so-called B shares that entitled them to 30 percent of operating earnings. “PIMCO’s headline numbers looked terrific all those years: great inflows, revenues through the roof,” says Mediobanca analyst Thiele. “But ordinary shareholders didn’t benefit that much.” Over the past four years, Allianz has bought back the B shares and now fully owns PIMCO. But Gross’s annual salary — reportedly $200 million last year, compared with Diekmann’s $9.2 million compensation package — rankled shareholders.

当总汇率开始时，他们的投诉增加了。In March 2011 the bond king wrote in his widely followed “Investment Outlook,” posted on the firm’s website, that U.S. interest rates “may have to go higher, maybe even much higher to attract buying interest” when the Federal Reserve ended its bond-buying program known as quantitative easing. He then sold all the U.S. Treasury holdings in his Total Return Fund. Talk about bad timing. Far from heading for the exits, the Fed moved from its second stint of QE to Operation Twist, which shifted purchases to long-dated Treasuries, to yet a third round of QE in 2012. (The central bank’s Federal Open Market Committee was expected to finally pull the plug on QE at its meeting on October 28–29.) Rates didn’t soar; they plumbed record lows, taking the yield on the Treasury’s benchmark ten-year note from 3.41 percent at the start of March 2011 to just 1.43 percent in July 2012. Total Return’s 4.15 percent return for 2011 ranked in the bottom 13 percent of similar bond funds, according to Morningstar.

Gross never recovered his footing. He scrambled with risky bets in emerging markets, the periphery of the euro zone and inflation-indexed Treasury bonds. But in three of the past four years, Total Return underperformed the majority of its rivals.

既有表现不佳的表现强烈的紧张局势，伊利亚，56，谁是首席执行官和共同CIO。他们在Pimco的海峡贸易楼坐在彼此相邻，他们的争吵被许多公司的投资组合经理忽视了。“如果他不同意你的投资理念，比尔可能会变得令人讨厌，”召回一个年轻的投资组合经理，他加入了PIMCO，因为他对粗暴的令人钦佩并谈论匿名的条件。“他会指出，他有更长时间且更好的追踪记录。”

El-Erian’s resignation in January stoked more client outflows, largely from Total Return. PIMCO, with Allianz’s backing, insisted that Gross agree to the naming of six deputy CIOs, all of them experienced portfolio managers, from whose ranks his eventual successor would emerge. The appointment of the deputies was “a recognition of the depth of talent that PIMCO has,” Ralph said in an interview before Gross quit.

六是Ivascyn之间的领跑者,早晨好gstar’s fixed-income manager of the year in 2013. The publicity given to these appointments, as well as others in less senior positions, surprised longtime Gross watchers. “It’s as if Allianz was letting the investment community know that the old days of the bond king were over and that they were surrounding him with lots of high-level talent,” Erik Gordon, professor at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, said in an interview withIIin August.

起初，毛得出可以对变化进行充分的反应，并称赞新的助长和投资会议的气氛。但持续兑换的持续赎回很快就讨论了关系。9月初，在与粗糙的对抗痛苦之后，几位高级管理人员 - 包括新的继承人明显，伊夫斯索尼斯 - 据报道，据威胁要戒烟。Allianz可能会给另一个可能的继任者带来脱离。在Pimco的执行委员会被排除在外的咨询中，与Allianz的批准，决定债券国王不得不去。游戏计划是向9月的最后一个星期日提供信息，并与他的默许，周日发布官方公告。

Gross learned of it even earlier. On September 16 he contacted Jeffrey Gundlach, head of DoubleLine Capital, a $52 billion bond specialist based in Los Angeles, and sounded him out about joining his firm. Nothing came of that. Gross next approached Janus CEO Richard Weil, who had worked under him as COO at PIMCO for a decade. The $178 billion-in-assets Denver-based firm has long been mainly an equities house, but Weil jumped at the opportunity. Early in the morning on Friday, September 26, Janus announced that Gross was coming on board and would manage the Janus Global Unconstrained Bond Fund, beginning October 6.

PIMCO and Allianz were badly caught off guard. By the end of September, Total Return had shrunk to $202 billion in assets from an April 2013 peak of $293 billion, according to Morningstar.

PIMCO’s TROUBLES HAVE pushed AGI into the limelight, but the equity-oriented manager doesn’t yet have the critical mass to rival the California firm as an engine of growth for Allianz.

COO Corley，58，花了她的夜晚和周末写小说;她在英国西萨塞克斯郡举办了五大侦探小说，她长大。她在她一天的工作中的成就就像值得注意的那样。在掌舵的不到三年内，她看到AGI的资产第三次。大多数增长来自第三方任务 - 主要是养老金基金，也是零售客户。

Though largely known for its German clientele, AGI has extended itself elsewhere in Europe and sought to expand in the U.S. and Asia. AGI still has a reputation for being largely an in-house asset manager for Allianz, but Corley uses this as a selling point to third-party clients. She tries to impress upon them that there are few asset managers with AGI’s experience in providing the range of products and geographic coverage that an investor like Allianz demands. “We are attracting more external clients in part because they recognize our credibility in servicing Allianz,” she says.

Under Corley, AGI has balanced its reputation as an equity specialist by bolstering its offerings in fixed income (now about 40 percent of its total portfolio) and alternatives, such as infrastructure financing. AGI has plunged into multistrategy, multiasset products that combine both fixed-income securities and equities and are aimed at creating alpha in today’s volatile, low-rate environment. “They have made very good progress over the past year with what looks like the right sort of product offerings for this market,” says Andrew Broadfield, a London-based equity analyst for Barclays Capital.

Some of the most successful offerings for retail clients were designed by AGI in collaboration with Allianz insurance specialists. They involve annuities and life insurance products that protect policyholders if the value of their investment mix of bonds, equities and alternatives declines, while allowing them to participate in the upside. These products are marketed to individual policyholders through their pension funds or financial advisers.

例如，Allianz Invest4Life将终身保证最低年金与资本市场通过Allianz基金进行回报。这种产品的一个吸引力是，当客户死亡时，剩余的账户价值被传递给受益人。在德国开发，Invest4Life在法国和意大利的过去两年里介绍，并绘制了总收入的15亿欧元的流入。

With other products, however, AGI still struggles with distribution. RiskMaster is a case in point. Offered in the U.K., the product is tailored to the individual risk profiles of clients, who are placed in four categories ranging from aggressive to defensive. The most risk-averse receive products with strong downside protection but limited upside potential. Since the products’ launch in May 2012, the return for the lowest-risk Allianz RiskMaster Defensive Fund has been a pedestrian 8.41 percent, while the highest-risk portfolio has outperformed its benchmarks with an 18.43 percent return. Total investment in all four portfolios has barely reached $50 million, though.

对于其他产品，AGI远远超过欧洲市场。使用其投资团队在San Diego，前尼古拉斯 - Applegate装备，现为Allianz US高收益率，AGI开发了一个高收益债券产品，为高端香港零售市场开发了外币对冲。从2012年1月到今年上半年的成立，该产品已经绘制了超过90亿欧元的净流入。最近，AGI创建了一项欧洲股票基金，2014年上半年从香港客户推出超过10亿欧元。“谁会认为亚洲投资者想要购买欧洲股息产品？”询问Agi的首席投资官Andreas Utermann。

AGI还扩展到旨在的替代投资，该投资旨在为希望在艾莉洲项目投资的保险公司和养老基金。在金融危机之后，银行将贷款减少到某些部门，包括公共工程建设。像Allianz这样的深袋装保险公司已经进入了空洞。“他们要求我们在这些类型的空间中为他们创新，”Utermann说。

在欧洲，AGI已成为基础设施债务产品的市场领导者，该产品开始于2012年初绘制资产管理人员。在今年6月30日的18个月内，AGI完成了十项优惠 - 主要是道路建设项目 - 七个欧洲总计20亿欧元的国家。法律和监管复杂性可能比融资更大。“每次达成协议时，我们都必须建立它以适应参与该项目的法国，德国或意大利保险公司的偿付能力II要求，”Corley说。

AGI最大的客户 - 和PIMCO的 - 是Allianz本身。在德国，大多数人寿保险传统上被销售，保证持有人的保证率。“但由于利率非常低，保证产品越来越难以融资，偿付能力等要求更多的风险资本提出这些担保，”Allianz Investments首席Zimmerer说。“这让我们越来越靠近资产管理业务。”

一家名为IndexSelect的Allianz产品，销售在德国，投资于股权指数中的客户的年度固定收入返还。保险公司在股票市场上购买了一个选择，以便客户风险失去超过一年的回报。对于美国的类似产品，在主要的Allianz Life Business涉及可变年度的可变年度，保险公司依靠日常对冲和衍生品。

In matching assets to liabilities, Allianz depends heavily on PIMCO for bonds and on AGI for the bulk of its equity portfolio. “There are also third-party providers because you always need competition for your own companies,” Zimmerer says. “It is our own money, so we have to be demanding with both PIMCO and AGI. If the performance isn’t there, we will do something.”

Allianz坚持认为它不推动AGI加速其增长，并为PIMCO提供更多的平衡。“我们不认为这两家公司的规模都是相同的，”拉尔夫董事长说。但AGI的一个更大的足迹将有助于减少对PIMCO的长期担忧。

目前，PIMCO正在努力克服第三方客户持怀疑态度。“在某些时候，您必须确定这是留款的正确的地方，当有很多其他选择考虑时，S＆P Capital IQ的互助资金研究总监Todd Rosenbluth表示，标准的单位＆Poor’s rating agency that provides financial data and analytics; the outfit is advising its retail and institutional clients to look for alternatives to PIMCO.

If and when PIMCO recovers its allure, the debate will resume over whether Allianz should sell it or at least reduce its stake through an IPO. “This is the worst possible moment to sell PIMCO,” says the Ross School’s Gordon. “If Allianz does eventually decide to do so, they will wait until they can show that it’s an asset that doesn’t depend upon Bill Gross.”

But what would Allianz do with a multibillion-dollar windfall from the sale of a healthier PIMCO? “The challenge would be to find another opportunity — say, a large insurance target in the emerging markets with a good risk-return profile,” says Mediobanca analyst Thiele. But there are no obvious targets in Asia or Latin America. Many big insurers in those regions aren’t listed. And when they are, they tend to be government-owned, as in China, for example. Besides, Allianz is already gaining market share organically thanks to its strong balance sheet. Why take on the risk of a large acquisition?

许多Allianz股东毫无疑问，欢迎来自PIMCO销售或IPO的收益。即使这没有发生，管理层也在压力下，将其目前的40％的盈利支付比率提高到股东，他们因Pimco动荡而获得Allianz股票价格滚落的股东。许多分析师认为，在年底之前，保险公司可能会宣布支付比率增加到利润的45％，但该公司表示，该公司表示没有计划改变其股息政策。

“当然，他们可以为股东做更多更多，但我认为他们不会，”伯尔尼斯坦的赛德尔说。“关于Allianz的好处是他们的政策公告的可靠性。他们坚持他们所说的话。“

And taking Allianz at its word, shareholders should not expect further changes at PIMCO now that Gross is gone. “It is business as usual,” insists Ralph, pointing out that the management changes and investment policies at the asset manager are sufficient.

Mission accomplished? • •

See alsoPIMCO’s Global Market Thought Leaders blog。