Axioma, a provider of enterprise market risk and portfolio management solutions, announced that has entered into an agreement with RPMI Railpen (Railpen) to supply its portfolio optimization solution. Railpen is the investment manager for the Railways Pension Scheme one of the UK’s largest and longest established pension funds. Railpen will use Axioma Portfolio Optimizer to model portfolios and risk tolerance and so enhance investment decision making.
Railpen, which is responsible for the investment of around £27 billion on behalf of the scheme’s 350,000 members, selected Axioma for the flexibility and robustness of its optimizer solution plus the ease with which it can be seamlessly integrated into the scheme’s existing portfolio management systems.
Sunil Rajan, Managing Director of International Sales at Axioma, said:
As Asset Owners’ investment strategies become more sophisticated with a shift towards building diversified portfolios which combine smart beta strategies with passive ones, their in-house investment capabilities and systems need to evolve to achieve this. We are delighted that the flexibility of our Portfolio Optimizer which integrates directly with both Railpen’s internal systems and processes will help them to achieve this goal.
The initial feedback on our Portfolio Optimizer solution has been highly positive and we are hopeful that in time we will be able to deepen and extend our relationship with Railpen beyond Axioma Optimizer.
Tony Guida, Senior Investment Manager at Railpen, commented:
For our in-house quant equity strategies we use several proprietary data and optimisation models. We needed an optimizer that can be integrated into our framework and that we can call using open source language.
The Axioma Optimizer is central to our research and portfolio construction, the conception and the design of the library is perfectly suited for a hybrid set-up and allows us to improve our optimisation models for quant equities.