IRELAND – The Irish National Treasury Management Agency, the investment management supervisory body for the country’s e7bn National Pensions Reserve Fund, says it has received around 600 expressions of interest for the huge raft of mandates totalling e6bn in assets that it put out to tender last month.

John Corrigan, a director at the NTMA in Dublin, comments: “ We’re still cleaning the data, but we got in around 600 applications for the mandates. “ That’s not 600 firms, because many put in multiple applications for the mandates.”

The NTMA’s initial manager trawl was run through an electronic tender process using a hybrid version of the IPE-Quest on-line manager search software.
“ We’re in the process of going through that data and the electronic tendering process seems to have worked really well.
“Given the volume of applications we expected and got, the IPE-Quest/NTMA system has helped manage a process that otherwise would have been very labour intensive.”

Corrigan says he hopes the NTMA will have finished stage one of the manager filtration process around the first week of September.

Stage two consists of the sending out of detailed RFPs for submission by managers.
Corrigan notes: “The RFPs will be going out in September to the successful managers which have made the cut.

Depending on the number of applicants for each mandate, the RFP requests will be sent to no less than five managers and no more than 20.
Asset managers will have roughly four to five weeks to complete the RFP. The NTMA will then draw up shortlists of between three and five managers.

“We’re looking at early October for this and then we are targeting early November for a decision, which is what we said all along and we’re broadly on target for that,” explains Corrigan.





The full list of mandates for the reserve fund as set out in the OJEC journal is as follows:

* 3 pan-European equity active core portfolios valued at about e300m each – benchmarked to the FTSE All-World Developed Europe index.

* 1 US equity enhanced index portfolio valued at about e350m – benchmarked to the FTSE AWI North America index

* 1 US equity active growth portfolio valued at about e300m – benchmarked to the FTSE AWI North America index

* 1 US equity active value active portfolio valued at about e300m - benchmarked to the FTSE AWI North America index

* 1 (or possibly 2) Japanese equity active portfolios valued in total at about e300m – benchmarked against the FTSE AWI Japan

* 1 Pacific basin ex Japan equity active portfolio valued at about e90m – benchmarked against the FTSE All World Developed Asia Pacific ex Japan

* 1 (or possibly more) Eurozone equity passive portfolio(s) valued in total at about e2bn – benchmarked against the FTSE AWI Eurobloc

* 1 (or possibly 2) US equity passive portfolios valued in total at about e625m – benchmarked against the FTSE AWI North America

* 1 Eurozone long bond active portfolio valued at about e350m – benchmarked against the Merrill Lynch EMU Direct Government Bond Index 10+ years ex Ireland)

* 2 global equity active portfolios valued at e350m each – benchmarked to 50% against the FTSE AWI eurobloc and 50% to the FTSE All-World developed ex Eurobloc.

As a result, the initial asset allocation for the fund will be 40% in eurozone equity, 40% in rest-of-the-world equity – hedged to a 50% level, and 20% in Eurozone long fixed income.







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