One of the first to air the concept was Anton van Nunen and in the Netherlands it was first implemented at VGZ, a Dutch insurance company, where Haitse Hoos was the first Chief Investment Officer of a fiduciary mandate.
UK pension schemes started using fiduciary management in 2003, when some clients of River and Mercantile Solutions (formerly P-Solve), the ex-investment consulting arm of Punter Southall, asked it to implement its investment advice for them.
The complexity manifests itself primarily in three different ways: a) increasing range of options available for the investment of assets and management of risk (e.g. new asset classes such as hedge funds and new instruments such as swaps and other financial derivative instruments), b) increasing regulatory complexity (e.g. the Financial Assessment Framework (FTK) for Dutch pension funds) and c) the increasing (real or perceived) instability and or volatility in financial markets which calls for a more dynamic approach to asset management.
Only those asset owners that have sufficient scale can organise themselves in an economically efficient and sustainable manner to handle this increasing complexity.
As a result, many pension funds lack the scale and skill to effectively and efficiently manage the increasing complexity internally.
Leading examples in the first group include AXA, Blackrock, BMO Global Asset Management, Goldman Sachs, ING, Kempen and Robeco – Corestone while Russell Investments and SEI Archived 2010-04-12 at the Wayback Machine are leading examples of the second group.
Examples in this group are Aon Hewitt, Angeles Investment Advisors, Mercer, River and Mercantile Solutions and Towers Watson.