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.
HESTA goes with Grow for admin
HESTA has partnered with Grow Inc. for its outsourced administration services, building on Grow’s existing administration partnership with Mercy Super, which merged with HESTA in late 2022. HESTA CEO Debby Blakey (pictured) said the move would help provide “personalised, seamless experiences across various channels at scale” to its more than one million members.
“Partnering with Grow Inc. represents an opportunity for us to respond to the fast-changing needs of HESTA members in real time, enabling our services and experiences to support them whenever and wherever they need us,” Blakey said in a release.
“The Grow Inc. platform is expected to help us improve member experiences, data management and provide us the flexibility to innovate at greater pace and more efficiently. That’s going to help our members face the future with confidence and support a seamless super experience for our partners.”
With the new contract HESTA will be severing its relationship with Link Group, which represents around four per cent of Link’s revenue for FY23. Link has been under pressure for some time following a failed takeover bid from Dye & Durham and regulatory woes in its UK arm, while AustralianSuper recently put the group up for review while extending its contract out to 2025 to ensure business continuity.
“I’d like to acknowledge the work of the Link Group and recognise their continued hard work and dedication in helping our members and employers,” Blakey said.
Grow started life as one of a slew of millennial-focused super funds, touting an active management bent where competitors in the same space mostly provided indexed options, before shuttering the offering in May 2022 citing regulatory and scale pressures. It pivoted to fund administration in 2019, poaching Qantas Super COO Peter Savage to head up the business and winning mandates from GigSuper, Mercy and Vanguard Super. Citi invested in four rounds of funding for Grow since its launch in 2017, and has worked with the business “very actively” on a number of client solutions.
“They realised the true value of the company was the technology they built to do member administration, and it’s evolved from there in a pretty rapid way,” then Citi Securities Services Australia head Martin Carpenter told ISN in 2022. “They’re starting to get some significant momentum in the market… If we can better connect the wholesale-level custody data information to the member administrator for the benefit of members, that’s the vision of where we’d see this going.”
