GERMANY -- Investment consultant FERI has appointed Arnd Thorn to the new position of overall institutional business head with immediate effect.

Thorn was previously head of the German arm of PIMCO, the bond fund specialist unit of Allianz Global Investors (AGI). A FERI spokesman said that Thorn, 45, would join the consultant “in the next few weeks,” as the details of his departure from AGI still had to be resolved.

Thorn’s appointment is part of a restructuring at FERI that sees the bundling together of some of its institutional consulting services – including fund analysis, manager selection and asset advising – into a new unit called Feri Institutional Advisors (FIA).

FERI managers Dirk Söhnholz, Jürgen Olbermann and Min Sun will have operational responsibility for FIA, which will have a staff of nearly 50.

At the same time, institutional consulting services – like asset-liability matching, risk management and strategy advising – are being brought together in a separate entity, Feri Consulting. FERI manager Hartmut Leser has operational responsibility for this unit.

FERI’s joint venture with German pensions adviser Heubeck AG is not affected by the restructuring.

The restructuring follows the recent departure of several senior FERI managers.

In recent months Watson Wyatt recruited Torsten Köpke from FERI to head a new investment consultant team and Julia Beinker, who headed FERI’s asset manager selection, joined Union Investment, a German institutional fund provider.

In addition to Thorn, FERI’s four-member board includes Helmut Knepel, responsible for fund rating and research; Matthias Klöpper, chief financial officer; and Michael Stammler, who in charge of private wealth management and is FERI’s chief executive officer.









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