£45bn Midlands pension fund group names new investment chief

LGPS Central manages the pooled assets of eight Midlands-based local government pension schemes, which have approximately £45bn of investment assets between them. LGPS Central, like its counterparts around the country, is gradually taking on the management of these funds, currently overseeing £20bn.

Before joining LGPS Central, Ross had a stint at the Financial Conduct Authority working as a technical sector specialist, according to his LinkedIn profile, after three years at Fidelity.

Ross cut his teeth in asset management at Morgan Grenfell. After roles at JPMorgan Chase and at HSBC Asset Management, he went on to work at Invesco as director of worldwide fixed income and Deutsche Asset Management as director of global institutional fixed income.

Separately, in a 19 May statement, the CIO of the Brunel Pension Partnership, a group of 10 UK public-sector retirement funds in Southwest England managing around £30bn, announced that he had resigned to “pursue other opportunities”.

Prior to his time at Brunel, Mark Mansley was the chief investment officer at the Environment Agency pension fund for six and a half years. He has also worked at Rathbone Greenbank Investments as investment director and, earlier in his career, at Chase Investment Bank and Schroders.

Mansley, who had been at Brunel for nearly three years, said in a LinkedIn post that he was hoping to move back to something “more investment focused”.

He added that he was “particularly interested in understanding strategically what the new world we will inhabit post Covid-19 means for investment”.