UK - The World Gold Council will launch a UK knowledge bank website later this month enabling UK pension plans to access research and expertise to deepen the understanding of gold investment.

The launch will follow the start of a similar website www.pensions.gold.org in mid December aimed at US pension funds, designed to provide US pension funds with information encouraging them to consider investment in gold.

As the London-based organisation only wants to increase transparency of gold as an investment, it will not offer a trading platform, Katharine Pulvermacher, managing director investment research & marketing at the council said.

The organisation does not plan to target other countries: "We are quite a small organisation, we have only five or six people working on the investment side so to be able to provide an adequate level of service we necessarily have to limit the number of countries we can be active in," she told IPE today.

The World Gold Council runs active investor relations and investor education programmes in the US and the UK markets aimed at pension funds and their advisers.

However, "the current exposure to commodities in the US and the UK markets is still very limited," according to the organisation, "If you look at the allocation to alternatives, less than 1% of UK pension fund assets are invested in the asset class."

The council's move comes as the precious metal has recently seen its biggest price increase in four years, with the decline in the US dollar spurring demand for gold as an alternative investment.

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