This week's mandate round-up includes the Wiltshire Pension Fund, the West Midlands Pension Fund, Standard Life, Vanguard, State Street Global Advisors, Pareto, Berenberg Bank, Newton Investment Management, Baring Asset Management, Pyrford International and PIRC.
Standard Life appoints Vanguard to manage tracker funds
Standard Life has this week announced the appointment of Vanguard Asset Management Limited to manage its tracker funds. The appointment follows the decision by Standard Life Investments to close its OEIC tracker sub funds and focus more on active fund management.
Standard Life Assurance Limited has undertaken a thorough review to select a new passive fund manager and Vanguard has been chosen from a strong field of investment houses.
Graham Dow, head of investment group relationships at Standard Life said: "Vanguard have a global presence, a wealth of investment expertise and their overall scope and scale makes it possible to look at longer term opportunities for strategic partnerships.
"We were impressed by them throughout the selection process and they are the right choice to take over the management of the Standard Life tracker funds."
The fund names, risk profiles and management charges will stay the same. The transfer of the underlying investments will be completed be finalised by the end of June.
Wiltshire Pension Fund announces two framework agreements
Early this week the Wiltshire Pension Fund announced the details of two framework agreements.
The scheme was looking to establish a framework of one or more specialist managers to implement a dynamic currency hedging programme covering the fund's £500m overseas equity assets.
The aim is to reduce the volatility of investment returns in Sterling and minimise cash outflows associated with the hedge while benefitting from favourable return rates.
Wiltshire said it would consider both non-discretionary quantitative and discretionary approaches, but said purely absolute return currency approaches would not be considered.
Three manager have now been included in the framework, these being State Street Global Advisors, Pareto and Berenberg Bank.
The fund also had a tender out for a multi-asset portfolio framework agreement worth £100m. It is expected that the preferred approaches will generate excess returns over 3 month Sterling LIBOR by a significant margin (expected to be 3 % p.a. or higher), over rolling 3-5 year periods. For this Newton Investment Management, Baring Asset Management and Pyrford International were shortlisted. A final selection is due to take place in the next two weeks.
West Midlands Pension Fund appoints PIRC as proxy voting manager
Wolverhampton City Council, as administering authority for the West Midlands Pension Fund send out a notice that their tender for a proxy voting manager has been fulfilled. West Midlands has decided to continue with PIRC, which already held the position.
First published 05.05.2012
azeevalkink@wilmington.co.uk
