The middlemen

PENSION PLAN OUTSOURCING SERVICES ARE STARTING TO TAKE OFF IN CANADA

Joe Gelly has a bone to pick. Since being appointed managing director of Canadian institutional services at Russell Investments Ltd. and moving to Toronto from Boston last year, it seems all anyone wants to talk about is the country’s big, successful pension funds. But that’s not what Gelly wants to hear. Instead, he’s more interested in the smaller players in the space that are struggling more than ever to manage their mandates. “Everybody here is focused on the large part of the market so much that I feel like the one guy at the party being a jerk about it,” he says. “I don’t really understand it. They are in such good shape. The area of the market that is vastly underserved is the small to mid-sized market that nobody ever talks about.”

Needless to say, Gelly wants to change all that, namely by seizing control of an emerging trend for investment outsourcing services in the Canadian marketplace. Outsourcing, or multi-asset fiduciary solutions as industry insiders call it, is an arrangement whereby smaller