Insight Investment, a global investment manager with GBP741.9 billion under management, has appointed Claire Bews as a Senior Portfolio Manager in its Strategic Credit team, part of Insight’s GBP153.8 billion Fixed Income Group.
Prior to joining Insight, Bews spent 20 years at M&G Limited as a Credit Portfolio Manager, managing active and buy and maintain credit strategies and serving as a Trustee Director of its pension scheme.
Insight’s cashflow driven investment solutions have proven popular with clients and the firm currently manages GBP129.5 billion in cashflow aware assets. The Strategic Credit team manages a portion of these assets and Bews will be supporting that effort, importantly being focused on delivering corporate credit management for Insight’s Integrated Solutions mandates, plus working on Strategic Credit’s flagship buy and maintain suite and long-term credit portfolios. The Strategic Credit team, which includes nine2 investment professionals based in London and New York, is directly supported by three quantitative analysts and draws its research from Insight’s 42-strong fixed income credit analyst function.
Adam Mossakowski, Head of Strategic Credit at Insight, says: “Claire is extremely well-regarded by the investment industry and her appointment brings a new source of ideas to our team, thereby encouraging innovation and strengthening our investment capability. Her experience is well aligned with the strategies that we manage on behalf of our clients, who have shown an increasing interest in Integrated Solutions and Strategic Credit; assets have almost doubled from GBP21.6 billion to GBP41.9 billion in five years.”
Adrian Pogson, Head of Solutions Management at Insight, says: “We are very pleased to be able to draw on Claire’s extensive credit management expertise, particularly within our Integrated Solutions capability. Integrated Solutions helps pension schemes more efficiently balance liability hedging, liquidity management and growth generation as they seek to maximise the certainty of achieving their endgames. Credit assets play an important part in such solutions as, structured correctly, they can help investors to meet multiple competing priorities.”
As with all Fixed Income teams at Insight, the Strategic Credit function draws on Insight’s proprietary environmental social and governance (ESG) risk ratings, Prime, including direct application of the firm’s climate risk model. Issuer engagement is a significant part of Strategic Credit’s investment activity and Claire will be heavily involved with this alongside the team. Insight believes that ESG concerns are important drivers of investment value. We seek to integrate responsible investment practices across our business and are committed to taking ESG risks into account when designing investment strategies.
