Helping hand

Hand is tried and tested in the financial world. He worked for Euronext, ING Bank, Rabo Securities and IMC Trading in the past 20 years. The recurrent theme in his career is risk management.
Through Zanders Interim Services, Hand started working at APG Asset Management in October 2009. Zanders Interim Services provides temporary (independent) employees who understand treasury and risk management and can be put into action on diverse projects without a hitch. Hand’s risk expertise was essential in the various assignments he carried out for APG in the past few years.

Tremendous challenge

The task of APG Asset Management is to yield a good return with the pension capital it manages. Among other things, APG Asset Management trades daily in derivatives that are not listed on the stock exchange with a score of different financial parties. The OTC trading activities of APG Asset Management were accommodated in a new private limited company in April 2010. “We assisted the new organization (actually an APG treasury center) with setting up the risk policy.

“We helped setting up the risk policy”

The work varied from developing a risk management manual and thinking about risk management governance to setting up report structures and drawing up mandates.” These are the projects you can get Frank Hand excited about. “It is a tremendous challenge to build something from scratch and handle transfer of knowledge,” he enthuses. Of course, Hand knows he can always count on the support of his Zanders colleagues. “I can rely on Zanders knowledge. If you need your colleagues, they are there for you.”

Immensely diversified

Between August and December 2010, Hand worked for the Investment Control department, a division of APG Investment Management, where he made an assessment of the way non-liquid investments were dealt with. “We took a look at matters such as pricing, transparency and information provision there,” he says. After this project, Hand started his third job, this time for GTAA (Global Tactical Asset Allocation), one of the 14 APG funds. This fund has a deviant risk profile and therefore is structured in APG Asset Management in a different way.

APG wanted to appoint a prime broker to play the role of adversary for all OTC transactions and handle the administrative settlement of these transactions in order to mitigate the risks. Hand took care of the entire selection trajectory for GTAA and structured the cooperation with the party selected. At this point in time he is involved in the implementation of the new prime broker and outsourcing the entire GTAA back-office.