Cardano

Fiduciary management delegates the entire investment decision-making process to an external provider, who takes responsibility for asset allocation, manager selection, and risk management in line with a scheme's specific liabilities. This is distinct from traditional asset management, where the scheme trustees retain allocation and manager-hiring decisions and only outsource individual portfolio mandates. Cardano's model is a direct result of the UK Pensions Act 2004, which increased the regulatory burden on trustees and drove demand for integrated, outsourced fiduciary services.

Cardano operates a manager-of-managers model for its private and public markets allocations. A dedicated research team conducts due diligence on external funds across asset classes including private credit, infrastructure, real estate, and public equities. Because Cardano does not manufacture its own funds, its selection process is positioned as independent of in-house product-distribution bias — a key differentiator in its pitch to pension trustees.

Cardano primarily invests through third-party fund managers rather than making direct investments. In private markets, this means committing to external infrastructure, private credit, and real estate funds. The firm's fiduciary management heritage and focus on liability matching favor delegated manager selection over the build-out of a large internal direct-deal team.

Cardano's model is tilted toward fund commitments rather than aggressive co-investment programs. Because its client base consists of defined-benefit pension schemes with specific cashflow and solvency requirements, the emphasis is on diversified, commingled fund vehicles managed by specialist GPs. Co-investment capabilities exist in the infrastructure and private credit sleeves but remain secondary to the core fund-of-funds approach.

Cardano's Dutch operations — Cardano Risk Management and Cardano Asset Management — are regulated entities that serve the Netherlands' large pension fiduciary market under a separate legal and regulatory framework from the UK business. Both ultimately sit under the same holding group and share the LDI-centric investment philosophy, but they operate with distinct client teams and comply with local Dutch pension law.