Russell Investments - Global Investment Services and Fiduciary Management

Founded in 1936, Russell Investments is a global investment management company that provides strategic consulting and advisory services, implementation services, industry-leading performance indices (such as the Russell 1000®), and a range of sophisticated investment funds and solutions to clients in more than 40 countries.

A 40-year consulting heritage combined with 30 years of investment management experience gives us a unique perspective to design and implement flexible outsourcing solutions for investors of all sizes. This includes defined benefit and defined contribution pension schemes, charities, endowments and foundations, government agencies, banks, insurance companies, and other financial companies.

We also partner with financial institutions and investment advisors, whose individual investors can gain access to Russell's expertise.

Investment consulting and strategic advice

Russell is among the largest, most well-known institutional consultants worldwide, with over £430bn of assets under advice. The breadth of our clientele, coupled with four decades of institutional experience, give us comprehensive insight into the variety of challenges faced by pension fund trustees and finance directors.

Our wide range of advice covers all aspects of investment, including:

• Objective-setting and asset allocation, including asset liability modelling (ALM), risk budgeting, de-risking, liability-driven investment (LDI) and liability-responsive asset allocation (LRAA)
• Asset class policy and portfolio structure
• Investment manager research, selection and monitoring
• Fund review and performance evaluation

Investment and financial-asset management

Having pioneered the Multi Asset Multi Strategy Multi Manager™ concept 30 years ago, Russell now manages over £100bn in assets across a wide range of traditional and alternative asset classes, including regional and global equities and bonds, real estate, private equity, portable alpha and active currency strategies. This allows comprehensive and strategic diversification.

At the core of this outsourcing capability is Russell's depth and quality of manager research, which has been developed over the last 40 years. In 2008, Russell analysts held more than 5,200 research meetings and conference calls with more than 2,600 investment managers in 23 countries.

Investment performance improvement implementation services

Russell offers a wide range of implementation services – many pioneered by the company – designed to help clients to improve investment performance and minimise the costs and unintended risks of complex investment assignments.

These services include transition management, commission recapture, synthetic enhanced rebalancing, cash management, synthetic exposures and agency foreign-currency exchange.

Fiduciary management for pension fund trustees

We combine our rich consulting heritage with our investment management and implementation experience to help pension fund trustees to manage complex investment arrangements through our fiduciary management services – also commonly known as implemented consulting.

Through these services we help pension scheme trustees find the right balance of decision delegation and would generally take responsibility for:

• Helping pension plan trustees formulate comprehensive investment objectives and a dynamic investment strategy
• Executing the investment strategy, including managing asset and overlay managers
• Controlling and monitoring the risk and performance profile of the overall portfolio and all its individual constituents, including transparent and comprehensive reporting on progress versus objectives and guidelines

We would take accountability for the overall outcome relative to the objectives. In short, these services can alleviate internal limitations on expertise and resources. They would also deliver an integrated asset liability solution that ensures that the pension fund is managed effectively at the total fund level, while providing control where it matters, unambiguous accountability, and effective and dynamic implementation.