FRANCE - The €32bn Fonds de réserves pour les retraites, France's national pension surplus fund, has issued a handful of passive mandates for Eurozone and North American equities.
 
The three mandates for the Eurozone are worth €3bn and currently managed by Barclays Global Investors (BGI), Credit Agricole Asset Management and Vanguard.
 
Vanguard is also the sole current passive manager of North American equities, which will be expanded into two briefs, worth €2.8bn, and extended to mid-caps.

Jean-Louis Nakamura, chief investment officer at FRR, told IPE it would be looking at enhanced indexing mandates next year when it comes to review some of its active mandates. The fund will not consider enhanced indexation in the context of these passive briefs.

He emphasised that the process is obligatory under the laws governing the FRR.
 
He said the organisation must review its providers on the passive mandates after three years and all incumbents were allowed to retender.
 
The fund will also retender a standby passive mandate, currently held by BGI.
 
Apart from the obligatory nature of the review, Nakamura said that the new allocation was due to a strategic allocation from early last year which raised exposure to North American equities at the expense of the Eurozone, plus an increase in the fund's value.
 
The passive mandates will be worth in total 18.5% of all assets.
 
Their selection procedure would follow the fund's custom of looking first at stability of process and tracking error, followed at a later stage by a more indepth analysis of style and means used to track the indices and also of prices expected to be cheap on that kind of strategy.

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