Gill Wadsworth reported this week that one of the UK’s largest defined benefit (DB) schemes has appointed BlackRock to take control of if investments and advise on strategy taking the asset manager’s total fiduciary assets under management to GBP300 billion.
Wadsworth writes that the GBP8 billion British Coal Pension Scheme (BCPS) decision to appoint BlackRock is the latest high-profile fiduciary management appointment this year, reinforcing a trend to outsourcing governance to third parties.
This April, L&G’s Asset Management was appointed as fiduciary manager to the trustees of the Wellcome Trust Pension Plan and the Genome Research Limited Pension Plan, overseeing GBP800 million of assets. This followed Schroders Solutions snapping up a GBP2.97 billion fiduciary brief with the E.ON UK Group.
Anne-Marie Gillon, Principal Investment Consultant at Quantum Advisory, says: “The fiduciary management market continues to see steady appointment activity at the larger end, with recent growth in assets under management driven by larger schemes moving to fiduciary or outsourced CIO governance arrangements.”
Our In My Opinion this week finds Tom Hughes, Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Gemcorp Capital, writing that its latest research finds that institutional investors expect emerging market private credit to deliver better risk-adjusted returns than developed market yet still rate it a riskier option.
Hughes argues that this paradox says more about familiarity than fundamentals. “The key question is not whether emerging market private credit is riskier than alternatives in developed markets. It is whether investors have examined it closely enough to make an informed decision about both the risks and the opportunities,” he writes.
Beverly Chandler, Managing Editor, Institutional Asset Manager
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