In the first edition of AOX we look at the early data on whether pension schemes are actually investing more in private assets or not, in response to Rachel Reeves’s requests.

Younger generations are encouraging family offices to switch from a wealth preservation approach to a growth-focused one.

In a continuation of the year’s trends, the final quarter of 2024 saw the individual local government pension schemes and LGPS pools surveyed by MandateWire targeting alternative asset classes, with a strong preference for property and infrastructure, as well as private debt.

Pension consolidators ploughed into private market assets in the final quarter of 2024 as the Royal Mail Pension Fund appointed a manager to run the UK’s first ever collective defined contribution pension scheme.

Despite a quarter-on-quarter increase in transaction volumes, the number of bulk insurance deals completed by UK corporate pension funds in Q3 2024 was below the 16 recorded in the second quarter of the year. That drop in deals coincided with greater discussion around scheme run-on.

Local government pension schemes and LGPS pools surveyed by MandateWire in the third quarter of 2024 focused on alternative portfolios, in part due to the UK government’s push to encourage the LGPS to provide UK private market funding.

HSBC Global Asset Management topped MandateWire’s manager league table in September, winning the most mandates among the European investors we surveyed during the month, while BlackRock attracted the highest net inflows.

During the first quarter of 2024, MandateWire reported on the activity of 39 individual local government pension schemes and six LGPS pools.

As one of the most newsworthy assets during the past few years, cryptocurrency has gained attention for providing stellar returns but also for suffering steep losses. While crypto asset managers share a positive outlook for digital assets, institutional investors and advisors are less sanguine and more wary.

This broad overview of the investment trends MandateWire tracked during the second quarter of 2022 is based on surveys of 852 institutional investors from across Europe, North America, the Asia-Pacific, and the India, Middle East and Africa regions, with more than $35.7tn in combined assets under management.