Institutional asset allocators often have to balance the attributes of boutique managers and super-size fund houses. On the one hand smaller players have the potential to specialise and deliver growth through flexibility; on the other, encroaching regulation and the rise of passive investment appears to favour the larger players.

Unigestion, a privately owned Swiss-based active investment manager, appears to bridge that gap. The company currently manages $19.5bn on behalf of institutional investors and high net worth individuals and has experienced success of late delivering its tailor-made investment tools backed up by a focused on risk minimisation.

Assets under management grew by 38% last year alone and there’s been no sign of slowing down in 2016, following a number of new investment mandates, product launches and strategic hires.

“Unigestion is boutique with scale,” explains Fiona Frick, the company’s chief executive. Frick began her career at Unigestion in 1990 and led the development of the company’s equity activity five years later. She was appointed chief executive in 2011.

“In the current volatile, low rate, environment it’s important to have both of those characteristics. Having the ability to design strategies tailored to client need is crucial. At the same time, you need scale to fulfil ever-increasing compliance and risk requirements.”

The firm’s “investment DNA” is made up of a belief that traditional investment assumptions no longer hold true and building returns has become a much more creative process.

At the same time, she says, risk contributions now have a greater impact on performance than asset weightings, meaning Unigestion applies rigorous portfolio construction and stringent capacity and liquidity management across its portfolios.

It is a philosophy that has been honed over 40 years. Stability has been a key factor in providing the business with a long-term perspective – members of its senior management team have been with the company for on average 18 years.

Assets are divided between equities ($11.6bn), alternatives ($3.3bn), private equity ($3.2bn) and multi-asset ($1.4bn), with 95% of assets managed on behalf of over 270 institutional clients, including Merseyside Pension Fund, NPRF Ireland and The London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham.

All of the company’s long-only equity composites achieved their aim of providing significantly less volatile returns than their respective markets over 2015, and all outperformed their benchmarks gross of fees.

In private equity, 2015 proved to be one of Unigestion’s best years to date for secondary investing as it was able to achieve strong performance from its secondary funds, enhanced the profiles of some deals that had been made prior to 2015, and completed a number of highly attractive secondary transactions totaling around $120m of assets.

In the alternatives space Unigestion Long/Short Global Opportunities, its long-short equity and credit hedge fund acquired from Cube Capital in February, posted a 5.9% return net of fees. Over the same period the HFRI Equity Hedge Index lost -0.8% and the MSCI World fell by -0.9%.

“We were also very active in terms of working closely alongside our institutional clients to co-create solutions that closely matched their individual needs and circumstances,” adds Frick. RPMI Railpen, manager of the UK’s £22bn (€28bn) Railways Pensions Scheme, provided seed capital for two multi-factor funds it has created in partnership Unigestion.

One of the funds is a long-only active factor fund, the other a long/short factor fund. Through the use of an enhanced definition of factors, the strategies allocate to higher quality value stocks, less volatile momentum stocks, more diversified quality stocks and more stable small cap stocks.

Ungestion also worked closely alongside a Swiss foundation that came to it with three needs: it needed accurate look-through risk analysis of its portfolio; to understand its sensitivity to a range of different economic scenarios; and advice on how to restructure its portfolio if necessary. Based on Unigestion’s analysis, the foundation had a much clearer view on how its portfolio was aligned with the economic backdrop from a top-down perspective.