The Trustees of this pension scheme had decided to look at Manager of Managers for the global equity portion of their portfolio because they believed that this solution would provide the best diversification across regions and asset classes globally.

After a lengthy due diligence process, they chose SEI because of their long experience in the US and because they were particularly impressed with the SEI approach to manager selection and monitoring. As the scheme’s Investment Manager described it, “The big advantage of their selection process is that it gives us access to more managers than we could possibly monitor ourselves. With the best will in the world, we are guided by our investment advisors who do a good monitoring job for us but we couldn’t possibly monitor with the same depth and breadth that SEI can.”

Another feature of SEI’s approach is the way complementary managers are blended and this feature was also an important factor in their choice. “They look to get complementary managers and mix and match both the managers and the weights to minimise the risk and we were impressed by that process.”

Finally, the pension scheme has been happy with SEI’s responsiveness and customer service, noting especially the proprietary articles and analyses regularly sent to SEI clients that they tend to find more interesting that some of the other pieces that come through.