Insight's fiduciary management capabilities | Insight Investment

Fiduciary management is an investment approach in which trustees delegate some or all investment decisions to a specialist manager, within agreed guidelines and objectives. This can help schemes respond more quickly to market developments while maintaining trustee oversight.

Insight’s approach is built around funding objectives rather than separate targets for individual asset classes. We seek first to understand the pension scheme’s goals and constraints, and then designs the portfolio, implementation arrangements and reporting around the client's objectives.

Insight believes that traditional structures built from separate asset-class “buckets” can create unnecessary complexity and unintended risks. Our integrated approach considers how each investment decision affects the scheme’s overall funding position, liquidity needs and journey towards its chosen endgame.

Insight’s fiduciary capability builds on its expertise in fixed income, liability-driven investment, cashflow-aware investing and risk management. Much of this expertise supports defined benefit schemes, where assets must be managed in the context of liabilities, collateral requirements, benefit payments and changing funding conditions.

Insight has more than 19 years’ experience helping pension schemes seek greater certainty of outcome. Its fiduciary approach brings these capabilities together within parameters set by trustees, rather than treating growth, liability hedging, liquidity and cashflow generation as separate investment problems.

Insight assesses potential investment decisions for fiduciary clients according to their expected effect on the client’s overall funding objectives. This means that an opportunity is not evaluated solely against an asset-class benchmark: the team also considers how it may affect funding risk, liquidity, collateral, cashflows and the scheme’s ability to reach its endgame.

This approach is supported by proprietary systems designed specifically to manage portfolios in an integrated manner. It is intended to help the fiduciary team make and implement decisions within a consistent framework focused on the client’s ultimate objectives.

Insight undertakes much of the portfolio design, implementation, monitoring and day-to-day decision-making within the mandate agreed with the trustees. This can reduce the need for trustees to coordinate several managers or approve individual changes each time market conditions develop.

Delegation is combined with focused reporting, with intuitive graphics and ongoing communication. The aim is to give trustees a clear view of progress towards their objectives and the risks affecting the scheme. The model gives trustees oversight of the strategy and the parameters within which Insight can operate.