Charities are finding themselves strapped for resources, so are shifting the allocations of their investment portfolios to achieve their philanthropic goals

Retail investors have been pulling money out of ESG investments for several years as enthusiasm for the style turns negative. Is this reflected among asset owners?

Demand for equities rose, with the asset class accounting for more than a third of all expressions of interest and investments

The merger between Lothian and Falkirk schemes has been put on ice…again

Paul Maia, a partner at McKinsey, explains how family offices and pension funds are changing their behaviour towards private equity.

What are the challenges facing the chancellor and are British pension schemes really are laggards compared to Canadian ones, when it comes to investing in private assets?

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.

Nordic university and local authority funds continued their hunt for traditional balanced managers during the second quarter of the year, while other investors in the region sought diversification in illiquid alternatives.

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.

There was a clear divide between the actions of the 45 UK corporate pension funds and master trusts surveyed during the first quarter of 2024. While individual pension funds remain focused on de-risking and bulk insurance strategies, master trusts, with their longer investment horizons, concentrated on illiquid alternatives. 

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.

Investment consultants are advising UK defined benefit pension schemes to conduct wider investment strategy and governance reviews that go beyond their liability-driven investments as the Bank of England expands its emergency bond market support ahead of the end of its gilt-buying programme on Friday.

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.

As investor attention shifts from carbon emissions to biodiversity, asset owners are advised to consider the investment opportunities in natural capital. Companies that support resource efficiency, zero waste and the circular economy are hailed as attractive investments that both protect the earth’s natural resources and deliver strong returns.