Pantheon Ventures has won the mandate to handle £300m of venture capital investments for the £4bn Unilever Superannuation Fund (USF).

The venture capital component of the fund had previously been handled in-house by Unilever. However, the company is increasing the pension fund's exposure to private equity funds, from approximately 3% to 5%, and has chosen to work with a specialist manager. If you are going to do it, you have to do it very well. So it is not worth having less than a 5% weighting," explained Wendy Mayall, USF's chief investment officer. "It is not very sensible to have less than a 0.25% impact on the bottom line."

Unilever selected Pantheon because it is a locally-based firm with a good global presence, said Mayall. "We wanted a European-based resource, with offices in the US and the Far East." The fact that Pantheon has other big pension fund clients was also a consideration.

One third of Unilever's funds will be invested in a Pantheon fund of funds, and the rest will handled on a discretionary basis. Pantheon manages and advises more than $1.5bn worldwide.

Unilever's other external investment managers are Capital International and JP Morgan for international equities, and Schroders and Mercury Asset Management with multi-asset briefs.

q Northern Trust Company has won the mandate to serve as global custodian for the £4bn Unilever fund, following a review of custody arrangements.

Global custody operations had previously been split between Schroders and Royal Bank of Scotland, both investment managers for the fund. A review of custody arrangements had been in the pipeline, but the appointment last year of two additional managers made consolidation a logical step, says Mayall.

The selection process involved a disciplined ranking procedure, in which Northern Trust came out on top. Towers Perrin acted as a consultant during the selection. Stephanie Schwartz"