UN’s Herman Bril Named Arabesque CEO of Asset Management

London-based Arabesque Asset Management, which focuses on sustainable investing, has named United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund (UNJSPF) CIO Herman Bril to be its new CEO, effective in July.

Bril will be responsible for Arabesque’s global asset management business and its suite of artificial intelligence (AI)-driven sustainable investment products and solutions, including the firm’s net-zero climate investment strategy that will launch later this year. He will be based at the company’s new headquarters in London.

Bril, who joined UNJSPF as CIO in 2016, developed and implemented the fund’s sustainable investment strategy, and its assets under management (AUM) grew to $82 billion from $52 billion during his nearly five-year tenure.

“Technology and data are playing a key role in reshaping sustainable investing, spurring market transformation away from industrial-era concepts towards future-fit models and new horizons,” Bril said in a statement. “Arabesque can help drive change through its autonomous, sustainable investment products and solutions.”

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The UNJSPF has not yet named a successor to Bril. In January, the fund placed a job listing for a new CIO that closed Feb. 21.

Prior to becoming CIO at the UNJSPF, Bril was group chief financial officer (CFO) and managing director at Cardano Risk Management for nearly seven years, and prior to that was senior vice president, head of treasury and capital management at Aegon NV.

He was also previously CIO of Dutch insurance firm Interpolis, and was also head of asset management and CIO of Syntrus Achmea Asset Management, where he was responsible for Dutch pension funds with assets under management of €45 billion ($53.6 billion). Bril started his career at Deutsche Bank in Amsterdam, where he was a fixed income derivative trader.

Arabesque also named Ulrika Hasselgren, former global head of sustainability and impact investment at Danske Bank, as the group’s new head of Nordics as well as head of Europe for corporates and sovereigns.

In addition to overseeing Arabesque’s range of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data and insight services for corporate and sovereign clients in Europe, Hasselgren—who will be based in Stockholm—will lead the group’s activities and expansion in the Nordic region.

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Tags: Arabesque Asset Management, CIO, Herman Bril, United Nations Joint Staff Pension Fund, UNJSPF

The American Retirement Association (ARA) has successfully lobbied to have a provision removed from the latest COVID-19 relief bill that would have frozen the annual cost-of-living adjustments (COLAs) for overall contributions to defined contribution (DC) plans and for the maximum annual benefit under a defined benefit (DB) plan, effective for calendar years beginning after 2030.

A substitute amendment to the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, submitted by Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-New York, removed the COLA freeze limit from the bill (H.R. 1319). The bill— without the COLA freeze—was passed by the Senate on Saturday.

“This was a tremendous victory for the ARA and the retirement plan system,” ARA CEO Brian Graff said in a statement. “The government affairs team worked tirelessly to make this happen knowing that it would have been extremely challenging to get this fixed in the future, especially without the support of unions, which were exempted from the freeze.”

The ARA argued that if the freeze had been included in the bill, the qualified retirement plan contribution and benefit limits would have decreased significantly because they would have failed to keep up with the increase in the cost of living. The ARA also said the freeze would have reduced the incentive for employers to offer a qualified retirement plan and could cause some employers to terminate their plans.

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In an interview with CIO, Graff said that while “there’s no question” the pension reform is going to help very underfunded union plans of coal miners and teamsters, he also said it is “a little more limited in its application” than previous pension reform plans as “there’s nothing on defined contribution plans” in the bill.

However, Graff cited legislation introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Oregon, in December that he said the ARA is “excited about” and which would fill that void. The bill would restructure the existing, nonrefundable saver’s credit into a refundable, government-matching contribution of up to $1,000 a year for workers who save through 401(k)-type DC plans or individual retirement accounts (IRAs). The legislation also includes a COVID-19 recovery bonus credit that provides up to $5,000 in additional government matching contributions for the first $10,000 saved during a five-year period beginning in 2022.

The COVID-19 relief bill is back in the House, which is expected to approve the amended Senate version as soon as today.