Willem Klijnstra and Chris Jeffery will join from the beginning of March as strategists in the group's Tactical Asset Allocation Research and Strategy area. They will contribute LGIM’s fixed income and asset allocation investment teams, and more broadly to the Legal & General Group asset allocation process.
Klijnstra and Jeffery join the group from BNP Paribas Investment Partners, where they held senior positions within the Multi-Asset Solutions team at BNP Paribas Investment Partners. Klijnstra was head of research and acting chief investment officer, while Jeffrey was a senior tactical asset allocation strategist. They will both report to Emiel van den Heiligenberg, head of asset allocation at LGIM.
LGIM announced plans in November to launch its products into the European wholesale market. The group said at the time that there had been interest from global financial institutions in the UK, Germany and Switzerland and pension funds in the Nordics region in its active credit and absolute return strategies.
Klijnstra started his career at Fortis Investments in Utrecht in 1999 as a pension actuary, before becoming a portfolio manager for institutional mandates in 2001. In 2004 he assumed the co-responsibility for the portfolio management of Fortis Investments’ range of Absolute Return Tactical Asset Allocation portfolios. Prior to joining BNP in 2007, Jeffrey spent four years as an economist at the Bank of England, where he worked in monetary analysis.