Honorary Commendations 2015: Hall of Fame

Noël Amenc was the founding director of EDHEC Risk Institute (EDHEC), the centre for risk and asset management research established as part of the not-for-profit EDHEC Business School. Under his leadership – a post he relinquished in 2015 to concentrate on building EDHEC’s smart beta specialist indices initiative, ERI Scientific Beta.

Notable contributions EDHEC made during Amenc’s tenure at the top include:

advances in asset liability management and liability-driven investment that have clarified the importance of hedging, diversification and insurance for institutional risk management
the analysis of investment strategies and asset classes in terms of risk factors and contributions to asset and asset liability management;
the critical analysis of traditional forms of indexing and alternative weighting schemes
the reconciliation of factor investing and smart beta.

In addition to founding and leading EDHEC, he has conducted research in quantitative equity management, portfolio performance analysis and asset allocation, resulting in numerous academic and practitioner articles and books. He is on the editorial board of the Journal of Portfolio Management and serves as associate editor of the Journal of Alternative Investments and the Journal of Index Investing. He is also a member of the Monetary Authority of Singapore Finance Research Council and holds a MSc in economics as well as a PhD in finance.

When Dick Sluimers stepped down as chairman and chief executive officer from the €400bn+ Dutch asset manager and pensions provider APG, his legacy was already well-entrenched, having spent many years in the Dutch government before being appointed to lead ABP as it spun off its internal asset management group to form APG.

As the pensions administrator and investment organisation first and foremost for Europe’s largest and one of the world’s top ten pension funds, ABP, the huge Dutch public sector scheme, Sluimer was instrumental in turning APG into a streamlined operation split between pensions provision and asset management.

Sluimers began working for ABP in 2003 as a member of its executive board, where he managed its finances portfolio and became acting chairman from mid-2005. He was then formally appointed chairman two years later.

With a doctorate in general economics and having studied political science, Sluimers’s move to ABP was preceded by an extensive political career at various ministries over time in the Dutch government. After holding policy positions in the departments of Finance and Social Affairs and Employment, he was appointed deputy director general of the Ministry of Public Health at the Ministry of Welfare, Public Health and Culture at the end of 1987.