Cardano’s Book Jumps 25% with Client Win

(January 14, 2014) — Fiduciary manager and consultant Cardano has increased its client assets by a quarter with the win of a contract to advise pharmaceutical giant GSK’s UK pension funds.

The advisory contract, overseeing £10 billion, has brought the Anglo-Dutch firm’s client assets up to £50 billion. Of this amount, some £10 billion are managed on a fiduciary basis.

GSK lost its head of pension investments, and former National Association of Pension Funds Chairman, Martin Mannion, in March last year. Mannion moved to manage the £2.7 billion pension fund attached to high street retailer John Lewis.

Cardano was launched in 2000 with the view to manage risk and solvency rather than just pick asset managers and create diversified portfolios, which had been a common model.

Co-founder and CEO Theo Kocken told aiCIO last year that the company attracted clients not because of smart investment choices, but their risk experience. “You avoid risks of which you cannot bear the consequences and take acceptable risks that help reach your target. Resilience thinking is different from expected return thinking. It will be the ‘investment norm’ of the future,” he said.

To date, Cardano is the only European firm to release its fiduciary management results on any kind of meaningful scale. In November the company published its first five-year fiduciary management results, showing its clients outperformed their peers on a liability base by 30 percentage points.

The firm also picked up the aiCIO European Innovation Award for Outsourcing/Fiduciary Management. Nominations for this year’s event are now open.

To have your say on investment outsourcing/fiduciary management, take part in aiCIO’s third annual survey on the subject by clicking here.

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