Aon Hewitt has announced further findings from the poll of over 750 delegates at its annual pension conferences earlier this year.
The poll's results highlight the increasing willingness of trustees to consider a wider range of asset classes than has historically been the case within the industry. The data indicates that trustees are now much more prepared to accept that alternative assets have both a key role to play in reducing portfolio risk and may offer the chance of delivering attractive returns.
At this year’s annual conferences, 40% of delegates said they were open to the idea of investing in new asset classes. This response reflected the findings of Aon Hewitt’s 2013 Global Pension Risk Survey which found that 36% of schemes expect to increase their allocation to alternatives over the next 12 months.
Tim Giles, partner in Aon Hewitt’s Global Investment Practice said:
"In the current hostile market environment, pension schemes are examining every opportunity to balance risk and reward in their investment strategy. The response we saw from the delegate survey at our conferences both backed up the findings of our survey earlier in the year and highlighted the increasing readiness that trustees and schemes are showing to investigate new opportunities. These seem to be taking various forms, including examining alternatives to traditional indexation approaches, accessing a wider spectrum of absolute return bonds funds or exploring better diversified hedge fund investments.
With this increase, has come a rise in the number of schemes seeking guidance from third party experts on both how to assess and to access new asset classes and investment strategies with which they were previously unfamiliar."
Tim Giles continued:
"As a consequence of this growing willingness to look at new options, some schemes are also strengthening their expertise in order to have a better understanding of the asset classes they are using - and this is reflected by the growing prevalence of fiduciary management. The recently released Aon Hewitt Delegated Investment Survey 2013 showed that many schemes regard increased expertise as the main advantage of delegation."
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