Minnesota State Board of Investment, St. Paul, plans to develop its first statement of investment beliefs, Mansco Perry III, the board’s executive director and chief investment officer, said Monday at a meeting of the board’s investment advisory committee.
Staff members at the board, which manages $85 billion in state pension and other assets, will survey officials at the pension funds whose investments are managed by the board to help the staff and Pension Consulting Alliance, the board’s special projects consultant, develop the statement.
“Some large institutional investors have been doing this for the last decade or so,” Mr. Perry said. “I think it would be helpful for us to do this, too.” MSBI does have an investment policy, but Mr. Perry said while “some may think we have” a statement of beliefs in the policy, “I would say no.”
Mr. Perry said he would hope to have the investment belief statement available for review by the investment advisory committee at its Aug. 14 meeting.
Separately, Mr. Perry asked PCA and Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting, the board’s investment consultant, to review the board’s asset allocation, structure and risk profiles, and come back to the committee in August with any recommendations.
Aon Hewitt was hired by the board in January, replacing Callan Associates.
PCA will also review the environmental, social and governance policies of the board’s external managers and will deliver its findings to the committee at its Nov. 20 meeting, Mr. Perry said.
The board also has asked custodian State Street Corp. to aggregate the responses of the board’s external private equity managers to MSBI’s request that they provide data required in the Institutional Limited Partners Association’s fee disclosure template. The board last year began requiring all of its private equity managers to comply with ILPA disclosure and asked all current private equity managers to follow it. No date for completion was disclosed.
