The £30bn Brunel Pension Partnership has hired CACEIS to provide cost transparency and benchmarking services across the partnership.
The Local Government Pension Scheme (LGPS) pool - which manages the investments for the Avon, Buckinghamshire, Cornwall, Devon, Dorset, Gloucestershire, Oxfordshire, Somerset, and Wiltshire local authority funds, as well as the Environment Agency Pension Fund - said the three-year deal will enable Brunel to comply with the LGPS transparency code of conduct, which obliges the pool to provide cost data analysis to its underlying clients.
Brunel client relationship director Matthew Trebilcock explained: "We have a clear set of principles at Brunel with one being to adopt best practice collective governance. For us, this means ensuring we apply the same rigour to understanding our total cost of ownership, as we would to any other element of running our schemes. Only by having better oversight of our current spending, can we make more informed decisions for our members.
"We chose CACEIS to partner with as they provide cost transparency across all elements of running the scheme, not just investment costs. We also liked their focus on delivering quality, strongly validated data in innovative ways, making it quick and easy to interpret."
CACEIS said it launched the UK's first transparency dashboard back in 2017 to provide pension schemes with deep insight into the total cost of managing their pension schemes - covering all direct and indirect costs, and administrative as well as investment costs.
It said gaining clarity on all costs associated with running their pensions schemes, as well as delivering quality checked, easy to interpret data helps schemes deliver strong governance and better outcomes for pension scheme members.
CACEIS UK managing director Pat Sharman added: "The appointment by Brunel, arguably one of the most forward-thinking pools of local authority schemes out there, is a great endorsement of the role providers like us play in providing cost transparency insights and benchmarking.
"There is a great deal of work that goes into ensuring accurate and consistent cost data received from asset management firms and for many schemes, managing this analysis themselves would be prohibitive both in terms of cost and resources."
