George Vassos
Uniting Financial Services (Uniting) has awarded an AUD $100 Million global credit mandate to Omega Global Investors (Omega) in a further sign that institutional investors are seeking asset management partnerships beyond the ‘one size fits all’ product approach.
Omega has pioneered its coveted ‘investment co-design’ model to deliver client outcomes as its primary focus, supported by investment solutions based on a proprietary *Smart Beta Plus, factor-based investment approach.
Omega managing director George Vassos said the partnership with Uniting Financial Services began as a conversation to improve the fixed income portion of the client’s portfolio, simultaneously observing the ethical and environmental, social and governance (ESG) standards of the Uniting Church.
“We sat down with Uniting’s investment team and said: ‘OK, Omega’s systems and processes can filter out, or in, any number of factors across the ESG spectrum’. So that was a big tick. Next, it was a matter of co-designing the return and risk outcomes desired by the fund, and demonstrating our capacity for actively managing to this overall outcome within the global credit asset class.
“We are pleased to have secured this significant mandate, and we look forward to developing our working partnership with Uniting’s Warren Bird and his team,” Mr Vassos said.
Warren Bird, Executive Director, Treasury & Investments said global credit was a new investable asset class for Uniting, and so the choice of underlying manager demanded careful and specific pre-requisites.
“Omega demonstrated its capability for both partnering with us and also meeting some fairly stringent ESG and ethical hurdles,” Mr Bird said.
“Credit is an important component of our overall portfolio exposure given our need for reliable income and capital preservation. We looked to offshore credit to achieve broader exposure to a wider range of credit risk and return than we could find investing in domestic credit securities.”
Mr Vassos concluded: “This is further vindication for Omega with its motto: begin with the end in mind. This requires not only taking a holistic view of investable markets, but carefully interrogating the underlying factors for the benefit of investors to deliver to stated investment outcomes,”