Aon has taken on an additional £3.5bn in assets under management (AUM) with three new clients for its UK outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) service.

The clients are a £1.25bn pension scheme, which was investing across a range of asset classes and looking to simplify its investment strategy, a £1bn charitable foundation with a widely diversified asset pool, and the Aon Retirement Plan (ARP), Aon’s legacy defined benefit (DB) scheme.

According to Aon, ARP's trustees decided to appoint an OCIO to free up trustee time for wider strategic decisions and projects.

The adoption of these clients will take the AUM of the Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) delegated consulting business to over £29bn and globally to £144bn, as of 30 September 2024.  

Aon UK head of delegated clients, William Parry, said: “This is an exciting time for our delegated business. We have reinvigorated our OCIO offering as part of our delegated platform, investing heavily in technology and recognising the significant recent increase in the number of schemes looking to outsource.

“Seeing new clients voting with their feet and coming to us is always a positive sign.

“More and more pension schemes and asset owners are seeing OCIO services as the most efficient way to run the investment of their assets, allowing them a clear focus on strategy while retaining agility in the way the assets are invested.”

Parry said Aon was “particularly pleased” to extend the application of Aon’s investment expertise beyond the pensions sector by working with a blue-chip charitable foundation whose activities are enabling positive change for people.

“The difference in strategic goals and the impact this has on asset allocation is a fantastic test of the robustness of our platform, allowing complete freedom to explore the full opportunity set,” he added.

“As with our two new pension scheme clients, we will be bringing both our long-term strategic expertise to bear on the assets as well implementing this strategy via our OCIO function.”

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