Willis Towers Watson launches active share fund

Willis Towers Watson, which is best known as an investment consultancy, has extended its investment management services with the launch of a new equity fund aimed at institutional investors.

The global equity focus fund follows five other pooled funds, including a diversified multi-asset fund, two liquid alternative funds and an alternative credit fund. The global equity focus fund contains the top unconstrained equity ideas from stock-pickers around the world. Willis Towers Watson’s global head of funds, Paul Berriman, commented: “Our new equity focus fund is specifically designed to provide institutional investors with targeted access to the world’s best equity ideas with high levels of transparency of the underlying investments, at competitive fees. This is consistent with our vision to help all our clients – whether advisory or delegated – to achieve the best net-of-fees returns for the right level of risk and, if the vehicles don’t exist, we’ll build them.”

The fund’s portfolio manager, David Shapiro, added: “When looking at what was available to those clients wishing to invest in equities, we were dispirited by the preponderance of expensive index-hugger-type products. So we built something very different. While not for every institutional investor, we are confident that many disillusioned institutional equity investors, both large and small, will recognise the opportunity presented by this approach.” Willis Towers Watson’s six pooled funds have total assets under management of around US$5 billion.