Insight Investment manages £95.4bn in fixed income assets globally through an experienced and well-resourced team of 100 fixed income specialists. The team is engaged in managing assets against a range of traditional and highly bespoke benchmarks.

The firm’s specialism spans the spectrum of global fixed income opportunities and includes strategies such as global credit, buy and maintain and global absolute return bonds. The team also manages a wide range of US strategies, operating the world’s biggest and most diverse credit market; these cover core, core plus, corporate, intermediate, select income and long duration fixed income.

The combined global secured lending and loans capability “gives Insight a strong position in low-default risk, illiquid credit investments”, according to Adrian Grey, CIO of active management and head of fixed income at Insight Investment. It also manages short duration, high quality portfolios for public entities’ operating cash assets, tailored to their specific cash flow and risk tolerances.

BNY Mellon acquired US-based fixed income specialist Cutwater Asset Management in January 2015 and now operates the business under the Insight Investment brand. In the deal it accrued an experienced and well-resourced team of fixed income specialists spread between London and New York, with a track record of delivering client expectations across a range of markets and bespoke benchmarks.

Cutwater’s investment capabilities encompassed a wide range of US fixed income strategies including core, long duration, high yield, loans, absolute return and liability risk management. “These capabilities deepened Insight Investment’s fixed income research and portfolio management expertise in the world’s biggest and most diverse credit market,” says Grey.

There are other geographic ambitions on the agenda. In June this year Insight Investment won direct access to China’s onshore sovereign bond market through HSBC, the first bank to facilitate access to China’s Inter-bank Bond Market (CIBM) by an overseas financial institution. HSBC enabled Insight Investment to invest in the CIBM and will act as a settlement agent bank and custodian for the company. China is currently opening up its domestic bond market to foreign investors, with the CIBM already the world’s third largest fixed income market.

New fixed income fund solutions include the Insight Secured Finance Fund, which seeks to offer clients with longer-term investment horizons cashplus returns from the more liquid and esoteric parts of the credit market, include trade financing, receivables and bridge finance. The Insight Government Liquidity Fund will meanwhile invest mainly in reverse repos secured against UK government debt securities, targeting yield enhancement above standard reverse repo investments.

The Insight Liquid ABS funds offers clients an alternative to a conventional liquidity fund, offering the daily liquidity and high asset quality of normal liquidity fund with an enhanced return through investment in a portfolio of liquid asset-backed securities.

Insight notes that one of the key differentiators of its business is that it offers solutions rather than generic products. “Client service often begins before the mandate is awarded,” says Grey. “The starting point is often a dialogue about the investment outcome a client is seeking and an interactive process of solution design is then set in train. This is often the beginning of an enduring and collaborative partnership.”

Against a background of highly volatile credit markets, both segregated and pooled fixed income funds managed by Insight performed strongly, with 99% of portfolios, weighted by size, outperforming their benchmark over five years to 31 December 2015. Insight was ranked first for overall fixed income quality and investment quality in the latest independent Greenwich Associates survey.

Insight has increasingly aligned its fixed income proposition with liability driven investment (LDI) to enable clients to access holistic solutions designed to meet cash flow needs, maintaining return seeking assets and hedge interest rate and inflation risk. These solutions are seen as increasingly relevant to clients that are cash flow negative.