Since the emergence of “Modern Portfolio Theory” and the “Capital Asset Pricing Model” in the late 1960s, institutional investors have taken a quantitatively driven approach to portfolio construction, looking to create portfolio diversification and obtain better risk-adjusted returns by balancing their asset-class exposures. This journey has seen several important advancements in thinking about how to optimally achieve desired results.
Funds that want to take the total portfolio approach first need to get the total portfolio view. To do that they not only need data – and lots of it – but a rock-solid understanding of exactly how they’re going to use it.
Cbus prepares for custody shift
After its first custody review in more than 20 years, the $23 billion Cbus super fund is preparing to move securities servicing providers. The investment team has put a recommendation to the board to replace NAB Asset Servicing with JP Morgan Investor Services.
The review, overseen by Trish Donohue, Cbus’s executive manager of investment management, with advice from independent consultant Drew Vaughan and contracted advisor Alan Lazarus, was announced in February.
The review is the second hotly contested contract for JP Morgan this year. HostPlus spent about a year on its custody and securities servicing review, eventually deciding to shift from JP Morgan to Citi. It was Citi’s first industry fund client in Australia.
The Cbus win, which is big news in the custody world, will no doubt lessen some of the pain of the HostPlus loss for JP Morgan. It is also surprising. NAB has been Cbus’s custodian almost since the fund’s inception in 1984 and also enjoys a complex banking relationship with the fund. Cbus has a big property exposure, including its own construction company, Cbus Property, and NAB is a lender to and tenant of the fund’s portfolio.
One of the reasons cited for the recommendation to appoint a new service provider is the senior management changes at NAB Asset Servicing in the past year, including redundancies among the client relationship managers.
