France’s €32.6bn Fonds de réserves pour la retraite (FRR) has chosen the managers it wants to run an indicative €1.7bn in French and European small cap equity strategies.

JP Morgan Asset Management, AXA Investment Managers, BNP Paribas Asset Management and Fil Gestion have landed European small cap mandates, to which the pension reserve fund previously indicated plans to allocate up to €1.1bn.  

HSBC Global Asset Management, Amiral Gestion, Sycomore Asset Management, and BFT Investment Managers have been chosen to run up to €600m in domestic small cap investments.

The tender was launched in April last year, with FRR saying it would pay particular attention to how managers integrated environmental, social and corporate governance (ESG) issues in their processes. It has tightened its ESG focus for all manager searches.  

The public fund is in the middle of the selection process for US small cap mandates, and in the early stage of the selection process for Japanese equity mandates.

In February FRR announced it had lost 5.2% in 2018, its first investment loss in eight years. The stock market fall in the last two months of the year had dramatically affected its performance, it said.

Further reading

Why FRR doesn’t invest in green bonds – for now
Olivier Rousseau, executive director of FRR, explains the French pension reserve fund’s approach to green bonds 

France’s FRR addresses Brexit concerns in manager search
The €36bn fund took steps to remove Brexit-related uncertainty from having an adverse effect on the small cap manager search

Caisse des Depots, FRR headquarters, Paris

FRR’s headquarters in Paris