The ranks of investment managers looking after Europe's pension assets are joined this year by a new kind of manager. For the first time, 'in-house' managers of pension funds who are offering management services to third parties are included in the ranks of this $1trn industry.

In the 'European pension fund managers guide' for 1998, just published by Mercer(see page 23), three such groups are included in the listing of over 180 managers, who have to have at least one European pension fund mandate.

Two of the in-house managers come in the top 20 European rankings be-cause of the assets under management. The Schootse Poort investment offshoot of the Philips pension fund in Eindhoven had at mid-1997 $16bn of pension assets under management and is listed as having eight mandates, all of which were balanced and Netherlands-based. The PVF Pensionen (see below) had pensions assets of $15bn, but only three balanced mandates. However PVF's total assets under management come to over $24bn.

In the case of ABB Investment Management, the asset manager arm of the giant ABB Asea Brown Boveri, Swiss-Swedish conglomerate, the pensions assets are just one quarter of the $4bn under management. It has a mandate tally of 14, with just $83m of pensions assets being managed in Sweden and $424m in Switzerland.

The guide estimates the total European funded pensions market at $2.9trn, compared with $2.8trn last year, of which the firms covered in the guide manage around one third. Mercer reckons that of the 184 managers included, 102 now manage one fund outside their home country, with 23 handling assets in five or more countries. UK managers had the highest rate of growth in cross-border business, even beating the US groups. And the UK market, long seen as impenetrable, shows signs of opening up to outsiders. Forty non UK managers now control 5% ofthe UK's $1trn pensions asset market. Fennell Betson

Topics