Pension fund in the context of "Insurance companies"

A financial centre (financial center in American English) or financial hub is a location with a significant concentration of commerce in financial services.

The commercial activity that takes place in a financial centre may include banking, asset management, insurance, and provision of financial markets, with venues and supporting services for these activities. Participants can include financial intermediaries (such as banks and brokers), institutional investors (such as investment managers, pension funds, insurers, and hedge funds), and issuers (such as companies and governments). Trading activity often takes place on venues such as exchanges and involves clearing houses, although many transactions take place over-the-counter (OTC), directly between participants. Financial centres usually host companies that offer a wide range of financial services, for example relating to mergers and acquisitions, public offerings, or corporate actions; or which participate in other areas of finance, such as private equity, private debt, hedge funds, and reinsurance. Ancillary financial services include rating agencies, as well as provision of related professional services, particularly legal advice and accounting services.

Asset management is a systematic approach to the governance and realization of all value for which a group or entity is responsible. It may apply both to tangible assets (physical objects such as complex process or manufacturing plants, infrastructure, buildings or equipment) and to intangible assets (such as intellectual property, goodwill or financial assets). Asset management is a systematic process of developing, operating, maintaining, upgrading, and disposing of assets in the most cost-effective manner (including all costs, risks, and performance attributes).

Theory of asset management primarily deals with the periodic matter of improving, maintaining or in other circumstances assuring the economic and capital value of an asset over time. The term is commonly used in engineering, the business world, and public infrastructure sectors to ensure a coordinated approach to the optimization of costs, risks, service/performance, and sustainability. The term has traditionally been used in the financial sector to describe people and companies who manage investments on behalf of others. Those include, for example, investment managers who manage the assets of a pension fund.

An institutional investor is an entity that pools money to purchase securities, real property, and other investment assets or originate loans. Institutional investors include commercial banks, central banks, credit unions, government-linked companies, insurers, pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, charities, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts, investment advisors, endowments, and mutual funds. Operating companies which invest excess capital in these types of assets may also be included in the term. Activist institutional investors may also influence corporate governance by exercising voting rights in their investments. In 2019, the world's top 500 asset managers collectively managed $104.4 trillion in Assets under Management (AuM).

Institutional investors appear to be more sophisticated than retail investors, but it remains unclear if professional active investment managers can reliably enhance risk-adjusted returns by an amount that exceeds fees and expenses of investment management because of issues with limiting agency costs. Lending credence to doubts about active investors' ability to 'beat the market', passive index funds have gained traction with the rise of passive investors: the three biggest US asset managers together owned an average of 18% in the S&P 500 Index and together constituted the largest shareholder in 88% of the S&P 500 by 2015. The potential of institutional investors in infrastructure markets is increasingly noted after the financial crises in the early twenty-first century.

This is a list of sovereign wealth funds by country. A sovereign wealth fund (SWF) is a fund owned by a state (or a political subdivision of a federal state) composed of financial assets such as stocks, bonds, property or other financial instruments. Sovereign wealth funds are entities that manage the national savings for the purposes of investment. The accumulated funds may have their origin in, or may represent, foreign currency deposits, foreign exchange reserves, gold, special drawing rights (SDRs) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) reserve position held by central banks and monetary authorities, along with other national assets such as pension investments, oil funds, or other industrial and financial holdings. These are assets of the sovereign nations which are typically held in reserves domestic and reserve foreign currencies such as the dollar, euro, pound sterling and yen. The names attributed to the management entities may include state-owned (federal, state and provincial) central banks, national monetary authorities, official investment companies, sovereign oil funds, pension funds, among others.

Some countries may have more than one SWF. In the United States, several states have their own SWFs. In February 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order to establish a national sovereign wealth fund. The list does not include pension funds that do not meet the SWF criteria.

Unreported employment, also known as unlawful employment, illegal employment, working under the table or off the books is employment that is illegal and not reported to the government. The employer or the employee often does so for tax evasion or avoiding and violating other laws such as obtaining unemployment benefits while being employed. The working contract is made without social security costs and does typically not provide health insurance, paid parental leave, paid vacation or pension funds. It is a part of what has been called the underground economy, shadow economy, black market or the non-observed economy.

Payments are generally in cash, and the employer often does not check the employee's background or credentials, as is sometimes required by law or otherwise expected by the industry's client base, such as a license or professional certification.

Wholesale banking is the provision of services by banks to larger customers or organizations such as mortgage brokers, large corporate clients, mid-sized companies, real estate developers and investors, international trade finance businesses, institutional customers (such as pension funds and government entities/agencies), and services offered to other banks or other financial institutions.

Wholesale finance refers to financial services conducted between financial services companies and institutions such as banks, insurers, fund managers, and stockbrokers.