The Pension Protection Fund’s (PPF) head of LDI and credit and the chief executive officer of the asset manager for the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) have been named members of a senior‑level forum for bankers, investors and others to share their views on UK-related developments in financial markets with the country’s finance minister.
Evan Guppy of the PPF and Simon Pilcher, CEO of USS Investment Management, will join representatives of institutions including Aviva, Barclays, BlackRock, and JP Morgan Asset Management on the 20-strong Market Engagement Group.
According to HM Treasury, membership is personal, so if a member of a group leaves their institution, they will not be automatically replaced by someone else from that organisation.
The Market Engagement Group is currently expected to meet twice a year, with a maximum of 10 members at each meeting. PPF’s Guppy, for example, is not attending the first meeting today, a PPF spokesperson told IPE, but will be attending the next meeting. Meetings are held under Chatham House rules.
USS’s Pilcher said he was delighted to be involved in the group, whose first meeting he is attending today.
“We have a material interest in the future of UK financial markets so they support the fiduciary duty we have to our members,” he said in a comment for IPE. “The UK is key to USS’s investment strategy, with around half of our £80bn-plus assets invested in the UK, including close to half of our £26bn private markets portfolio.
“I look forward to working closely with peers to provide insights on how the UK can continue to be an attractive market for investors to deploy capital within.”
The origins of the Market Engagement Group can be traced back to a post-2024 desire by Treasury to institutionalise engagement with financial markets, especially Gilt investors, after a period of heightened sensitivity in the UK bond markets.
A plan for this kind of engagement was laid out last year, in the Mansion House speech and associated financial services reform agenda.
In a recent interview with IPE, PPF’s Guppy said the defined benefit lifeboat fund’s focus currently was very much on politics, both domestic and global, whereas in a typical investment scenario, the key information driving the investor’s decision-making would be macroeconomic.
“On Gilts, there is no shortage of political risk at present, and the market does not like uncertainty,” he specified. “Right now, we have a pretty clear set of fiscal rules and a government that is committed to keeping to those fiscal rules; any moves away from this world of certainty would be negative for Gilts.”
According to Ben Clissold, head of fixed income and treasury at USS Investment Management, USS is currently “probably more in favour of UK government bonds than overseas”.
“[W]e’re not that worried about the UK government in the long term,” he told IPE recently.
“It has gone through the Gilt crisis of 2022, and that will last long in the memory of politicians. That means they will do the sensible things, like raising taxes and having strong fiscal rules, that will make the UK government an attractive issuer of debt.”
