State Super has announced it has awarded a concentrated equities mandate to Neuberger Berman.
The fund said it had chosen Neuberger due to its newly designed global equities data-science (GEDI) integrated flagship strategy which integrated investment insights from data-science disciplines in order to help strengthen the firm’s existing environmental, social, governance (ESG) and research process.
State Super’s senior investment manager, Andrew Huang, who led a tender process to identify managers, said: “To us, Neuberger Berman appears to be meaningfully ahead of the curve in building and implementing this approach. We believe that supporting fundamental research with a solid data-science and ESG discipline will be a growing advantage over time”.
Neuberger said that three years earlier it had added a data science team to their team of nearly 650 investment professionals, brining the firm’s funds under management to US$330 billion ($503.6 billion), of which $83 billion was in listed equity investments.
“Our GEDI portfolio manager and chief investment officer of research funds, Hari Ramanan, designed this global equities approach at our research epicenter to take active positions by uncovering long horizon insights, including from innovative uses of data science,” Lucas Rooney, head of institutional business for Neuberger Berman in Australia added.
“It takes new techniques like this to be different enough from the crowd to matter for client portfolios.”
