“We wanted a lean team so we didn’t get bogged down in our own organisation, but that also means you’ve got to leverage a lot of external capabilities,” he says. Now pay attention, those managers which aspire to a Future Fund mandate (and that means most of you). Neal adds that he is well disposed to funds managers or investment banks which can provide “broader input” beyond the investment activity stipulated in their IMA. “Not every investment manager has to be able to provide additional input, but there really is an indirect investment value add."

"It might be that conversations with them help us frame our own strategic portfolio structure or understand the asset class better. Some will offer to do bespoke pieces of research for you – we’re interested in those types of collaborative arrangements, we commit to a relationship and get something a bit broader.” No mandate with the Future Find will be set in stone. “I like the idea of a mandate evolving, or tagging on an extra mandate with a manager in which we can co-invest. I want a manager who’ll say to us, ‘within the context of our mandate, we’ve bought enough of this, we wouldn’t want to buy any more but we think it’s a great idea’. We then have the chance to say ‘great, we’ll set up another structure somehow and buy some more of it’,” Neal says. “It’s efficient for us to have that sort of deep relationship with a relatively small number of organisations, rather than having 200 investment managers working for us that you can’t control.” It follows that Neal’s team is exploring the possibilities of multi-asset class mandates.

None have been awarded as yet (BlackRock Investment Management provided an overlay strategy but that is purely synthetics-driven and used for execution management) but Neal is looking keenly, partly because he sees multi-asset class mandates as an instructive benchmark for his own team. “We are interested in looking for organisations that can manage against our type of mandate. To go to an organisation and say – we want CPI plus 5 per cent over five years, manage to that. Not many places are equipped to think over that long-term time horizon and across multiple asset classes, most are shorter term and like the comfort of a benchmark to manage to,” Neal says. “It’s potentially a very powerful information tool for us. If we’re not doing as well as that external manager, the board and Paul are going to say to us, ‘well what are you doing?’”

The pleasures of youth