Premier Trend Among Superannuations: Insourcing, Paper Concludes

(February 3, 2012) — Insourcing — the act of taking internal control of any investment management activity previously handled by a service provider — has emerged as a growing trend within Australia’s superannuation world within the past couple of years, a recent paper by Round Tower Solutions concludes.  

In order for the investment management industry to be successful at taking more activities in-house, organizations must weigh risks, reward, and cost, according to Aongus O’Gorman, the paper’s author — previously at QIC – Round Tower Solutions’ Managing Director, told aiCIO. 

He said: “If you’re going to start from scratch, get the governance structure right — that will be fundamental to everything.”

According to O’Gorman, organizations most likely to be successful at in-sourcing are generally larger funds — or those with greater resources and more advanced governance structures. “A big organization can screw things up as much as small a small organization, so it’s a question of how you deploy the resources you have.”

The paper asserts that a number of factors have driven this trend toward insourcing.

1) Funds have grown in scale and thus have the resources to undertake more detailed investment activities;

2) Increased competition has led to a focus on costs, with larger funds realizing that internalizing investment management may be more efficient than hiring external managers;

3) The success of a number of endowments in the US and some local success  has led funds to believe this success can be replicated;

4) Disenchantment with the cost and use of external management.

This growing sense of disenchantment with the cost and use of external help is not unique to Australia’s investment management industry. In March of last year, Scott Sleyster, chief investment officer for Prudential’s American operations, told aiCIO:

“We actually like to run most strategies in-house. There has been a move to outsource investment management at a number of insurance companies, even with fixed-income investments, which really should be an insurance company core competency. At Prudential, if we see an asset class and we like what we see, we usually want to build that capability internally.”

Meanwhile, Leo de Bever the CEO of Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) — the corporation created to manage the province’s pension and sovereign wealth fund — spoke positively of internal private equity teams to aiCIO. “I paid [US $160 million] in external fees last year,” he said in a December 2010 interview. “I think we can cut that down by four times if we move some of it internally.” His outlook reflects other large Canadian institutions, which have created internal private equity team to pursue direct investments and avoid external fees.