Friends Life CIO Departs for Aviva Investors

(December 3, 2013) — Mark Versey, CIO of insurer Friends Life, has taken on a new role as director of client solutions at Aviva Investors, aiCIO can reveal.

Reporting directly to CEO Euan Munro, the role will see Versey offer CIO support and services to clients of Aviva Investors, the biggest of which is the wider Aviva group.

After initially focussing on delivering the strong investment performance required from the wider Aviva Group businesses, it is understood Versey’s role will then build on this capability to offer an outsourced CIO capability to Aviva Investors’ external clients.

A spokesman for Aviva Investors told aiCIO: “Mark will work closely with our new CEO, Euan Munro, to further strengthen our investment proposition, support our internal clients and grow the business externally, as we embed our focus on investment solutions that deliver income with low volatility.

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“That we have attracted someone of Mark’s calibre to this role is a strong indicator of the positive direction of our business.”

Versey had spent a little more than three years leading the investment charge at Friends Life, and was involved in the insurer setting up its own asset management arm in 2012.

Prior to this, he was CIO for AXA UK, and held various roles at Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers, and Deutsche Bank.

In his Friends Life role, Versey oversaw two major pools of assets—the legacy with-profits funds and the annuity business—in addition to the Friends Life Investment asset management arm. The total number of assets he was responsible for was £95 billion.

In 2013, Versey made it onto aiCIO’s Power 100 list for the first time, entering at number 45.

The appointment comes five months after Aviva Investors poached Standard Life Investments’ GARS guru Euan Munro to become its CEO.

It also occurs just days after the asset manager announced it was cutting 6% of its global staff, including a number of senior managers, as part of a restructuring exercise.

Among the approximately 60 staff leaving the firm are the head of credit Mark Wauton and the head of equity solutions Iyad Farah, two sources close to the company told Reuters in November.

(December 3, 2013) – Norway’s sovereign wealth fund (SWF) has taken a further chunk of London’s premier shopping area, while PensionDanmark has announced the purchase of wind farms in the UK.

Norges Bank Investment Management, which oversees the assets of the world’s largest SWF, today said it had bought a 25% stake in a building named Quadrant 3 from the Crown Estate, the organisation that looks after property owned by the UK sovereign.

The deal marks a further acquisition in the London’s Regent Street area for the SWF, which made its first purchase in 2011, and more generally a deeper move into prime commercial real estate. The fund has a stake in Sheffield shopping centre Meadowhall and took a substantial holding in central Paris earlier this year.

It has earmarked 5% of its assets, which were revealed yesterday to have risen to $818 billion, to the asset class. This means some $41 billion is to be put to work. Today’s announcement accounts for just $97 million.

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Elsewhere in the region, PensionDanmark announced another infrastructure deal in the energy sector. It has paid £153 million for a 49% stake in six wind farms based in Scotland and Wales.

“Our investments in different types of infrastructure ensure our members an attractive and inflation linked return for many years,” said Torben Möger Pedersen, CEO at PensionDanmark.

Last month, the fund agreed an historic deal with an Abu Dhabi-based energy company to acquire 40% of a Dutch gas pipeline system for $240 million and in August, it invested £128 million in a new biomass power plant in the UK.

This followed Danish national fund ATP and PFA Pension, Denmark’s largest commercial pensions company, announcing they had bought new shares worth DKK2.2 billion ($400 million) and DKK800 million ($144 million) respectively in local energy giant DONG in October.

These funds are some of the largest in European infrastructure, according to data from Preqin.