UK - The £2.4bn (€3.6bn) Kent County Council Superannuation Scheme has finalised the restructuring of its UK equities portfolio by naming Invesco Perpetual.

Invesco will manage a £275m unconstrained UK equities mandate, leaving Societe Generale with a £200m mandate required to outperform the benchmark by +2% - down from a £400m held last year.

"Our interest in an unconstrained approach is that by ‘freeing' investment managers from a benchmark-driven mindset, managers can populate a portfolio with their best investment ideas, rather than managing risk relative to a benchmark index," Nick Vickers, head of financial services at Kent County Council, commented.

Schroders has maintained its £420m benchmark+1.5% mandate as this part of the UK equities portfolio was not put out to tender at the end of last year.

Elsewhere, the pension scheme of UK-retailer Somerfield has chosen State Street to provide custody, fund accounting, independent swaps pricing, and reconciliation services.
In addition, WM Performance Services, the European performance measurement division of State Street, will provide performance measurement services on £300m of the fund's assets.

"The swaps pricing and reconciliation services State Street offered us was central to our decision-making process," said Nick Redman, secretary to the trustees of the Somerfield Pension Scheme.

Somerfield was advised by Mercer Investment Consulting in the process of selecting a provider.