People moves: Compenswiss, LGPS Central seeking senior staff

compenswiss, LGPS Central, Wonen, Aon Hewitt, Union Investment, Stap, Franklin Templeton, Lombard Odier, BNP Paribas AM, NN Group, Law Debenture Pension Trustees, Metro Pensioenfonds, Barnett Waddingham, Carbon Tracker, Hermes, Man Group, Imperial College Centre for Climate Finance and Investment, Kempen, T Rowe Price, BlackRock, TKP Investments, Netspar

compenswiss – The CHF37bn (€32bn) manager of Switzerland’s first-pillar buffer fund is looking for a chief risk officer as a result of an internal reorganisation. The current chief risk officer at the Geneva-based fund, Marc Pfenniger, is to take over the operations department as chief operations and finance officer, leaving his role to fill. The deadline for applications is 5 January. 

LGPS Central – The asset manager set up to run roughly £40bn (€45bn) of consolidated assets of nine local authority pension funds is searching for a head of investment operations. The window for applications closed yesterday and interviews commence next week, according to a job notice. It describes the role as having ”significant influence in shaping the nature of the operational infrastructure of LGPS Central and will be able to make a substantial contribution to ensuring that the financial objectives of the company are met”.

The head of investment operations will report to the chief operating and financial officer, John Burns, one of a few key senior appointments LGPS Central has made in recent months. Others include the appointment of Andrew Warwick-Thompson as CEO and Jason Fletcher as CIO. Joanne Segars, former chair of the UK pension fund association, was appointed non-executive chair of the asset pool in May. 

Pensioenfonds Wonen – The €3.7bn pension fund for the furnishing sector in the Netherlands has appointed Guus Wouters as its new independent chairman. Wouters has been director of PMT, the €68bn scheme for metalworking and mechanical engineering, for the past seven years. He retired last October. At Wonen, Wouters is to succeed Pieter Verhoog.

Aon Hewitt – Pascal Hogenboom has announced that he will step down as chief executive of Aon Hewitt Netherlands as of 1 April. Hogenboom, who said he will leave of his own initiative, has been CEO of Aon Hewitt since 2013. Marc van Nuland, country manager for the Netherlands, said that the company had successfully repositioned itself under Hogenboom. Last year, the consultancy said it wanted to refocus on fiduciary management and investment advice as part of a strategic re-orientation.

Union Investment – Frank Engels is to take over as head of portfolio management at the German asset manager from 1 January. He will succeed Björn Jesch, who is leaving Union Investment at the end of the year at his own request. Engels joined Union Investment Privatfonds as managing director in January 2012 and was appointed to the unit’s board of managing directors in August 2014. He has been responsible for the multi-asset business within portfolio management since the beginning of this year. Before joining Union Investment, Engels worked for organisations including the IMF and Barclays Capital.  

Stap – Huub Popping is to succeed Erno Kleijnenberg as chairman of Stap, the general pension fund (APF) set up by insurer Aegon and its subsidiary TKP Investments. Kleijnenberg stepped down in October. Popping has been a trustee at Stap since July 2016. In 2006, he became chairman of the €8.2bn pension fund PostNL as well as company scheme TNT, which liquidated in 2015. In 2014, when the PostNL scheme was divided, Popping continued as chairman of the €700m pension fund of TNT Express.

Franklin Templeton – The US asset management giant has appointed CalPERS’ chief operating investment officer Wylie Tollette as head of client investment solutions, a newly created role within its Multi-Asset Solutions business. He rejoins the firm in January, having left in 2014. At this time he was head of Franklin Templeton’s performance analytics and investment risk group. Tollette is currently responsible for investment performance and policy, risk analytics, manager engagement and operations, among other areas, at CalPERS, the $345bn US public pension fund.

Lombard Odier Investment Managers – Velida Jahic, a former Swedish pension fund CIO, has been appointed head of Nordics. She joins from Nomura Asset Management in London where she was business development director for the Nordics. Before joining Nomura in 2011, she spent three years as a senior investment manager for alternative investments at Nordea Bank in Denmark. She was formerly chief investment officer of Gävleborg pension fund, a Swedish local authority fund.

BNP Paribas Asset Management – Elodie Lelief has joined the manager’s ETF and indexed fund solutions sales team within its new multi-asset, quantitative and solutions investment group and will focus on French-speaking clients (France, Monaco, Belgium, Luxembourg and Switzerland). Assets under management in ETFs at BNP Paribas have risen by 76% in just over a year following the introduction of a new strategy. Lelief began her career at BNP Paribas CIB in 2006 as a financial analyst for key corporate accounts. 

NN Group – Nationale-Nederlanden has appointed Robin Buijs as director of new pensions business. He will join on 1 January and succeeds Diederik Schouten, who is to continue his career outside NN. Schouten – a former director of Business Life Delta Lloyd – took up his position last April after the merger between the two companies. Currently, Buijs is head of integration at NN Group. Between 2012 and 2016 he was NN’s chief executive for Spain. Tjeerd Bosklopper is to succeed Buijs.

Law Debenture Pension Trustees – The trustee company has made two new hires for its secretarial and trustee governance team. Saadiyya Ahmed joined this week and Kathy Turpin last month. Turpin joined LawDeb from National Grid where she was a defined contribution (DC) scheme pension adviser. Ahmed was previously at Lloyds Banking Group, where she  spent the last four years in the pensions executive unit working on governance and scheme secretarial duties for numerous pension schemes.

Metro Pensioenfonds – Ronald Doornbos, consultant at pensions adviser Focus Orange, has been appointed as trustee at the €536m Metro Pensioenfonds. Currently, he is a member of the investment committee of the pension fund for wholesale firm Makro.

Barnett Waddingham – The UK consultant and actuarial firm has hired Andy Parker as a national DC consultant, following a 10-year career at Mercer where he was principal in the company’s DC and Financial Wellness business. Mark Futcher, head of DC consultancy at Barnett Waddingham, said the hire was the first of two senior appointments, the second of which would be announced in the coming weeks.

Carbon Tracker – CEO of Hermes Investment Management Saker Nusseibeh has been appointed non-executive chair of Carbon Tracker, the think tank behind the promotion of the term ‘stranded assets’. Nusseibeh succeeds Jeremy Leggett, who has held the position since 2011 and is stepping down to focus on his solar portfolio. Three new non-executive directors also join the board: Meg Brown, director and head of sales outside of North America at Impax Asset Management; Paul Bodnar, managing director of the Rocky Mountain Institute and a key architect of the Obama administration’s international climate policies; and Emma Hunt, an independent director and adviser who was most recently co-head of Hermes EOS.

Imperial College Centre for Climate Finance and Investment – Jason Mitchell, sustainability strategist at Man Group and portfolio manager at GLG Partners, is joining the centre’s advisory board. He said he was excited to help “bridge the divide between science/engineering and finance in order to solve one of the world’s biggest issues”. The centre’s goal is to help investors and policymakers “overcome the current lack of clarity about risk and return in emerging clean technology sectors”. 

Kempen Capital Management – Charlotte Tyrwhitt Drake is to join Kempen’s fiduciary management arm as business development director for the UK. She was previously an associate director at Cambridge Associates.

T Rowe Price – Nick Samouilhan has joined the asset manager’s multi-asset division as a solutions strategist for Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA). He joins from Aviva Investors where he was a senior fund manager in its multi-asset team.

BlackRock – Geert-Jan Troost has been appointed as relationship manager for institutional investors at BlackRock. Troost joins from Willis Towers Watson, where he was head of structured solutions for nine years. Prior to this, he worked in London for Citigroup and JPMorgan, focusing on structured fixed income markets.

TKP Investments – The €28bn Aegon subsidiary TKPI has appointed Rik Verhoeven in the new position of head of international new business as of 1 December. He is responsible for the firm’s international fiduciary services within the European institutional market, and will also focus on the international positioning and marketing of other asset management solutions. Verhoeven joined from Delta Lloyd Asset Management, where he was head of international sales and marketing for German-speaking countries as well as head of Delta Lloyd AM’s sales team for the Netherlands.

Netspar – Marike Knoef, member of the executive board of pensions think-tank Netspar, has been named as professor of empirical micro economics at Leiden University. At Netspar, Knoef researches pensions accrual, pension needs and the shaping of freedom of choice. She is already head tutor at Leiden University.