UK - Northern Trust is to manage a 60 million-pound (89.9 million-euro) manager-of-managers equities brief for the Monarch Airlines Ltd. Retirement Benefits Plan in the UK.

The mandate represents 45% of the airline’s 130 million pounds pension fund.

“We had three tenders and Northern Trust demonstrated a high level of knowledge and commitment to our cause and offered a very broad range of investment options,” a Monarch spokesperson said.

The spokesperson also said that Gartmore Investment Management, which with Legal & General Investment Management used to work for the fund, had lost its mandate.

“Gartmore no longer are used as a manager by the fund, but L&G continue to manage our passive equities and bonds.”

Mercer Human Resource Consulting advised the fund.

The manager-of-managers mandate, which according to Northern Trust, is one of the largest to be awarded to a single firm since the start of 2004, covers UK, Europe ex-UK, Pacific ex-Japan and Japanese equities.

Increasing size of UK manager-of-managers mandates is proving to be ‘a definite trend’ according to Tony Earnshaw, head of Northern Trust’s European manager-of-managers business.

Earnshaw added that more small mandates are also being awarded within certain asset classes, like Japanese equities, where“ the manager-of-managers approach can offer appropriate investment style diversification and the potential to achieve out-performance of the benchmark, cost effectively.”

Northern Trust has 521 billion dollars in assets under management.

Meanwhile, the two-year-old association for institutional multi-manager investing, AIMMI, elected Steve Delo chairman. Delo said that in 2003 the aggregated assets under management for the members of the association almost tripled over the assets gathered in 2002.

Topics