Mercer has announced that it has appointed Bill Muyskento the role of Chief Investment Officer for Alternative Alpha Strategies, a newly created global role within Mercer’s Investment Management business.

Muysken has more than 20 years investment experience including as a portfolio manager for Thames River Capital's multimanager alternatives team. Before his work in the hedge funds industry, Muysken had a 14 year career with Mercer, rising to Global Head of Research. Previously, Muysken had served for more than five years as Mercer’s Global Head of Manager Research and has served as a senior actuarial advisor in the Australian Government, where his duties included advising trustees of a pension plan covering more than 300,000 Australian government employees.

In his new role with Mercer, Muysken will be responsible for overseeing the investment management of strategies that include exposure to alternative alpha. For purposes of classifying its discretionary multimanager investment management capabilities, Mercer defines “alternative alpha” as including underlying investment strategies that make significant use of short selling, leverage or derivatives, or which are narrowly niche-focused or esoteric in nature. His role will include development and launch of new strategies, as well as oversight of pre-existing strategies already under Mercer’s discretionary management, including both multi-client funds as well as bespoke discretionary arrangements with individual clients.

“As a result of governance challenges that have become widely recognized due to the global financial crisis, we see substantial demand from our clients for assistance in better managing their existing alternative investment exposures, and in expanding these exposures” said Rich Nuzum, President and Global Business Leader for Mercer’s Investment Management business. “Bill was a very early and vocal proponent, well before the crisis, of transparent hedge fund investing. Transparent hedge fund investing provides for custody of the assets separate from the manager, separate and independent pricing, and access to timely risk reporting based on underlying holdings data. If more institutions had pursued transparent investment before the crisis, we believe their trustees would have slept more soundly as the industry experienced the scandals and other challenges that have plagued the alternative alpha space during the past several years. Clearly this governance model is of great interest post-crisis, and Bill is exceptionally well qualified to work with clients that wish to pursue this model.”

David Kaposi, leader of Mercer’s global alternatives manager research boutique, said “We are absolutely thrilled to have Bill rejoin Mercer in this role. This appointment reflects Mercer’s continued commitment to invest in research and management capabilities to serve our clients’ growing needs in the alternative investment space. Our twenty-five alternative investment manager researchers globally look forward to seeing their research output utilized by Bill and his team within our discretionary investment management business. ”