Danske takeover of NIB a blessing for staff: As National Irish Bank staff prepare to offer customers the suite of products being devised by its new Danish parent, Danske Bank, they have reason to be grateful that they are no longer part of the National Australia Group (NAB), which sold its Irish business last year.
NAB this week announced it would ballot its employees in Britain on plans to alter the terms of their defined-benefit pension schemes.
Until now, pensions for the staff at NAB UK operations were based on their final salary. The bank now proposes to base the pension on employees' average earnings over their career with the bank.
The move is the latest UK example of companies trying to plug holes in their costly defined-benefit schemes.
Under the terms of the transfer last year to Danske, NIB staff were offered a home computer and free broadband subscription for agreeing to participate in a computer training course.
They also got more than €2,100 in cash and shares . . . oh, and a commitment that there would be no compulsory redundancies and that their existing conditions of employment would be guaranteed, presumably including pension arrangements.
Not bad for moving from a bank with an image issue to one of the more innovative and progressive European operators in the financial sector.
Herd instinct departs analysts over pensions: Who says stock market analysts are sheep? It was pleasing to see a divergence of views this week on the effect that the reforms proposed under the National Pensions Review will have on Irish Life and Permanent (ILP).
Davy and NCB were bullish enough, with Davy saying that ILP was one of the financial stocks that stood to benefit the most from the proposed reforms, while NCB agued that the prospect of increased pension sales supports its "buy" stance on the stock.
Goodbody, in contrast, were non-plussed, pointing out that it could be some time before any concrete action emerges from the review and in the meantime all the action will be in the unwinding of the Special Savings Incentive Accounts.
These are already factored into the price of ILP shares on which they have a "reduce" recommendation.
Keeping hush on fees: Current Account salutes Declan Moylan, managing partner of Dublin solicitors Mason, Hayes & Curran, who has been named by The Lawyer magazine in London to its "Hot 100" list of leading legals.
Moylan, remember, was the first and only Dublin solicitor to reveal his firm's turnover when he declared in an article on these pages that the company's fee income in 2003 was more than €20 million.
The Lawyer used that information to carry out a wider analysis of the fees taken in by the biggest firms in Dublin, which, despite the move to tranparency in most other sectors, prefer to keep these things private.
In a business perceived to be among the biggest beneficiaries of the boom years, the magazine's turnover estimates were: Arthur Cox (€66.5 million); McCann FitzGerald (€60.8 million); A&L Goodbody (€58.9 million); Matheson Ormsby Prentice (€50.3 million); and William Fry (€47.5 million).
These firms are hereby invited to submit their turnover figures to Current Account in return for a place on our prestigious Top 100 list.
Come-on everyone. Only a Nobel prize is better.
Threat to economists: The economics profession was in a state of deep shock last night following the second successive correct forecast of Ireland's inflation rate by Ulster Bank's Pat McArdle.
One prominent economist was furious at the accurate outcome: "Getting your forecasts right is not the done thing. This sort of thing should be confined to the woolly jumper brigade in the ESRI. Pat McArdle is undermining the economics profession by getting it right all the time. Several of us could face redundancy as a result."
We are hoping that Pat gets it right a third time.
