FRANCE – The €5bn pension fund Caisse Nationale d’Assurances Vieillesse des Artisans, Cancava, has appointed 10 equity managers amid a revamp which saw eight of its former managers dismissed over poor performance.

The scheme, which pays first and second-pillar pensions to self-employed craftsmen, has switched from a mainly passive and balanced investment strategy to a specialised approach, a spokesman of the fund’s financial department told IPE.

The spokesman said the fund dismissed eight of its previous 10 equity managers in June, worth about E1bn.

The managers were “guilty” of “not good performance”, he said, but stressed the dismissal was also due to a reluctance to take risks.

“We used to have 10 funds managed in the same way by 10 different managers and that was not what we wanted,” the spokesman told IPE.

The managers who have lost out are Invesco, HSBC, Robeco, Credit Lyonnais, Natexis, Dexia, Fortis and Dresdner. SG Asset Management and BNP Paribas AM were retained.

The externally managed equity portfolio will be 60:40 managed active/passive. Active managers must follow a tracking error of at least five percent, the spokesman said.

The spokesman said that the new mandate sizes ranged from €50m and €100m.

SGAM scooped large-cap US equities, while BNP Paribas AM won large-cap Japanese equities.

Lazard Frères Gestion won a small cap Euro equity and large cap Japanese equity. Oddo AM won small-mid cap European equities while Fidelity gained blue-chip European equities.

La Compagnie Financiere Edmond de Rothshild won large-cap European and US equities. Synopia gained a quantitative Europe brief. Franklin Templeton won large cap European.

Axa IM gained large-cap US and small/mid-cap Japanese stocks. Loomis gained large-cap US.

Cancava internally manages the €2bn bond portfolio and has the passive management of a €500m equity mandate. It also manages its own real estate portfolio, worth about €1bn.

The private equity portfolio, worth approximately €500m, is taken care of by several managers, including Caisse de Depots and Nadexis, which have the largest mandates.

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