The pool runs assets for U.K. local authority funds, which have combined assets of £35 billion ($42.2 billion).
The assets that were outsourced to the pool as of Sept. 30 stood at £8.9 billion and were up 5.1% compared to last year.
Mr. Vickers said in the report that due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Brunel pulled back from Russian assets in 2022. “In February, we concluded the outlook for Russian assets had changed materially — from an investment and an RI perspective. We therefore chose to pull back from Russian assets,” he said.
The pool also on Thursday reported a widening gender pay gap.
Brunel’s female employees’ median hourly rate is 44% lower compared to male employees and worsened vs. last year when it was just 35% lower.
Still, the mean hourly rate for female employees was 18% lower than male employees, compared to 17% in the previous year. Brunel said that the figures are additionally skewed due to the fact that the pool’s CEO, Laura Chappell, is female. Two-thirds of upper middle and more than two-thirds of upper quartile roles at Brunel are filled by men.
Brunel also said Thursday that it managed to achieve cost savings of £34 million per year ahead of its 2025 target of £27.8 million. The U.K. pools were established in the U.K. to help local authority pension funds achieve scale and invest at lower cost.
“Cost savings were a core motivation behind the government’s launch of pension pooling. They are therefore fundamental to our purpose as a pool. We are very encouraged to be exceeding our targets in terms of both the size of savings made and the speed with which we are meeting them,” Joe Webster, chief operating officer at Brunel Pension Partnership, said in a news release.
