Co-operative Bank Pension Scheme, Manchester, England, has adopted a multimanager approach and dropped Colonial First State Investments as its sole, balanced money manager, said Alan Murphy, Co-operative Wholesale Society’s head of pensions.
The £280 million ($448 million) scheme hired Barclays Global Investors to manage £75 million in indexed portfolios. BGI will invest £41.2 million in U.K. equities with a benchmark of the FTSE Actuaries All Share index, and £26.2 million in international equities benchmarked to the FT/S&P Actuaries World index series, excluding the U.K. and weighted according to the WM 2000 measure of average asset mix across U.K. pension funds. The balance will be split equally between index-linked gilts and long dated gilts benchmarked to FTA indexes. Morgan Grenfell Asset Management and Henderson Investors were hired to manage active balanced mandates of £102.5 million each.
The fund had grown large enough to support a multimanager approach and no longer needed CFSI, said Mr. Murphy.
