More than half of delegates at the National Association of Pension Funds (NAPF) Investment Conference believe infrastructure will be the most intelligent investment for the next five years.
In a poll during one of the conference sessions, 56.7% of the audience said infrastructure would be the smartest investment, while 23.3% opted for farmland and 20% said emerging market debt.
Championing infrastructure as an investment opportunity, Meridiam chief strategy officer Julia Prescot said throughout the OECD the size of the opportunity in the asset class was “unimaginable”, while in the UK alone the government has £46bn to spend on infrastructure by 2016.
She also said the fee structure for infrastructure funds had come down recently, saying “two-and-20 is way out the picture” – and that it had become more explicit to investors when these funds were more private equity-like in nature.
However, National Employment Savings Trust chief investment officer Mark Fawcett said from the audience that he was commonly seeing managers charge 1.5-and-20, which often involved paying for committed rather than invested capital.
Comments