LGIM Interview: Which Stream, and What LDI Means

Every candidate who researches this firm starts from the same name, and the firm itself mostly stopped using it in 2024. LGIM, once the standalone brand for Legal & General's fund management arm, is now folded into a division Legal & General's own careers pages simply call Asset Management. The initials survive everywhere a candidate will actually look: in conversation, in the graduate scheme's own shorthand, in the job a reader is applying to.

They stopped appearing in the group's own headlines two years ago, which is worth clearing up first, because everything else about this firm follows from what it does, not from what it is called. It runs roughly £1.2 trillion, almost entirely for pension schemes, insurers and other institutions rather than everyday retail investors.

A large share of that book exists to hedge a pension scheme's liabilities rather than to beat a benchmark. Its own parent is an insurer, and the two businesses are far more entangled than the word "subsidiary" suggests. And its most interesting recent history is a market crisis that is almost always explained wrong.

Where LGIM stands today

That table is the skeleton. What follows is why the name changed, what the firm is paid to do, what really happened in the one crisis every candidate should be able to discuss properly, and how to tell two graduate jobs with almost the same title apart before applying to the wrong one.

The rename hiding in plain sight

Ask most people in the industry what LGIM stands for and they will answer without hesitating. Ask what it is called now and fewer will get it right, because the change happened quietly, at the corporate level, rather than through a press campaign anyone outside the industry noticed.

Legal & General's own careers page describes its Asset Management business as "created by combining our investment management (LGIM) and asset origination (LGC) capabilities," working alongside the group's Institutional Retirement and Retail businesses. That single sentence is the clearest primary statement of what happened: LGIM, the fund manager, and LGC, the group's private markets arm, stopped being two things and became one.

The result is not a cosmetic rename. It is a merger of a public-markets manager with a private-markets one, run by a single chief executive and reported under one set of results.

The 2024 merger that built the new division

Legal & General announced the combination in June 2024, framing it as bringing the group's public and private markets businesses together as one asset manager rather than running them as separate arms with separate leadership.

The appointment that made the new structure real followed a few months later: Eric Adler, previously president and chief executive of PGIM's private alternatives business, was named chief executive of the combined division on 24 September 2024, taking up the role that December, subject to regulatory approval.

He succeeded Michelle Scrimgeour, LGIM's chief executive since 2019, who stepped down as part of the handover. Laura Mason, who had led LGC, took charge of the new division's Private Markets business, reporting into the same structure.

The reshuffle was not cosmetic. It moved a private-markets specialist into the top seat of a firm built around index tracking and liability hedging, a signal of where the group wants the combined business to grow next.

An asset manager living inside an insurer

BlackRock and Vanguard answer to shareholders or to their own fund investors. Asset Management answers, ultimately, to Legal & General Group plc, an insurer that writes annuities and takes on pension schemes' liabilities in bulk. That parent relationship is not a footnote. It is one of the more distinctive things about working here, and it is easy to miss if a candidate treats "part of an insurer" as a throwaway fact rather than a structural one.

An insurer that sells an annuity or takes on a pension scheme's liabilities through a bulk transaction needs somewhere to invest the premiums and the assets it takes on, matched carefully against decades of future payments it has promised to make. Asset Management is where that investing happens.

The relationship runs in both directions: the insurer is a source of assets and a long-term client, and the asset manager is the insurer's own investment engine as much as it is a business selling mandates to outside pension schemes.

What the parent company changes about the job

• Balance-sheet discipline is part of the culture, not just a compliance function. An insurer's own regulators care intensely about how its assets are matched against its liabilities, and a business built to serve that need thinks in terms of duration and cash-flow matching by default.
• The client relationship with the rest of the group is not arm's length. Asset Management is measured, in part, on how well it serves L&G's own annuity and workplace pension books, not only on the mandates it wins from outside institutions.
• Private markets exist here for a specific reason. An insurer holding long-dated liabilities wants long-dated, illiquid assets like infrastructure and real estate to match against them, which is exactly the business LGC brought into the merger.
• The regulatory frame is an insurer's, layered on top of an asset manager's. Solvency rules that apply to the group as a whole shape what the asset management arm is asked to build, in a way that a standalone manager never has to accommodate.

Who gives Asset Management its money

Strip away the corporate structure and the client base tells the same story a different way. The overwhelming majority of what the division runs is institutional: defined benefit and defined contribution pension schemes, insurers including its own parent, and other large pools of capital that negotiate their own mandates rather than buying units in a fund built for everyone at once.

That matters for what an interview tests. A candidate who prepares a stock pitch, the default move for almost every other buy-side interview, is preparing for a conversation this firm rarely has. A candidate who can explain why a pension scheme hedges interest-rate risk, and what a scheme actually needs from its manager beyond a strong return, is answering the question this firm's own client base asks every day.

What the money is invested in now

Before the 2024 merger, the honest one-line description of LGIM was index tracking and liability-driven investment for pension schemes, with an active management business sitting alongside it. That description still covers most of what the firm does. What changed is the addition of a private markets business built for exactly the kind of long-dated, illiquid assets an insurer's own balance sheet wants to hold.

Public markets, index and LDI

£1.12tn

Private markets

£79bn

Legal & General's own H1 2026 results. The private markets business added through the 2024 merger with LGC is real and growing quickly, but it remains a small fraction of the index, active and liability-driven investment book that has always been the core of the firm.

The private markets business bolted onto the old firm

Private markets AUM reached £79bn at the end of the first half of 2026, up 22% on the year before, a genuinely fast growth rate for a business built mostly through one merger. It covers real assets, direct lending and real estate, the categories an insurer's own liabilities point toward, and it is the part of the firm Eric Adler was hired specifically to grow, given his own background running private alternatives elsewhere.

None of that displaces the older business. Index tracking, active equity and fixed income strategies, and the liability-driven investment book, described in full in the fund structures guide, remain the majority of what the firm runs and the more likely landing spot for most graduate hires. A candidate targeting private markets specifically should say so directly, because it is a distinct, smaller and newer hiring line inside a much larger firm.

The 2022 gilt crisis, correctly explained

Almost every account of the September 2022 UK gilt crisis available to a candidate tells some version of the same story: pension funds took on reckless leverage through liability-driven investment strategies, got caught out when gilt yields spiked, and had to be rescued by the Bank of England. It is a tidy story, it is widely repeated, and the Bank of England's own analysis of what happened does not support it.

The general mechanics, what LDI is and how the Bank's temporary gilt-buying operation worked, are covered in full in the fund structures guide and are worth reading before an interview that might touch fixed income or pensions.

The part worth adding here is the correction, because it is genuinely LGIM's story to tell: the firm was, and remains, one of the largest managers of LDI strategies in the UK, running pooled funds of exactly the kind the crisis exposed as structurally slow.

Why LGIM's own pooled funds were slower to recover

The Bank of England's staff research found that leverage inside LDI funds stayed low through most of the episode, and that pension schemes collectively held more than enough assets to meet the collateral calls their hedges generated. The funds were not undercapitalised.

What actually forced the wave of gilt selling was a structural problem: the capital sat with pension scheme trustees, not inside the LDI fund itself, and moving it from one to the other during a fast-moving market took longer than the market gave anyone.

A single-client, segregated mandate has one trustee board to coordinate with. A pooled fund serving many schemes at once has many, each moving at its own pace, which is why the Bank's research found pooled funds sold noticeably more of their gilt holdings by the end of October 2022 than single-client mandates did.

LGIM's own DB Solutions business runs pooled LDI funds of precisely this kind, which makes this less a story about the industry in general and more one about a structural choice this firm's flagship liability-hedging product had already made before the crisis hit.

Getting this right in an interview is not pedantry. It reframes the question an interviewer is asking, from "did pension funds gamble and lose" to "what does this reveal about how capital moves, or fails to move, between a trustee board and the fund that holds it," which is a considerably more interesting question and one a fixed-income or LDI-adjacent interviewer is far more likely to be testing for.

Who is running the place now

Eric Adler's appointment was not a like-for-like replacement. He spent his career before Legal & General running PGIM's private alternatives business, covering private credit, infrastructure, real estate and private equity, not index tracking or liability hedging. Putting him at the head of a firm historically built around exactly those two things says something about where the group wants the combined business to grow, and it is a more useful thing for a candidate to understand than his biography alone.

Three moves, one direction

1. June 2024. L&G says it will run public and private markets as one business rather than two.
2. September 2024. Eric Adler, a private-markets specialist with no LGIM or index-tracking background, is named to lead the combined division.
3. December 2024. Adler starts, and Laura Mason takes charge of Private Markets, the newer growth business rather than the legacy one.

A candidate applying to a public-markets seat should not read this as the older business being wound down; it is still the majority of what the firm runs. It is a sign of where the growth ambition sits, worth knowing before a "why this firm" answer.

Two graduate jobs wearing one name

Legal & General's graduate scheme runs eight named disciplines across the whole group, not just Asset Management, and two of them sit inside this firm specifically: Investment, and a separately labelled Distribution (Asset Management) stream. Candidates who assume these are two levels of the same job, or a rotation through both, are working from the wrong model.

What Investment and Distribution do, day to day

Investment stream

• Closer to the portfolio: research, strategy and the mechanics of running money
• Past rotations have covered areas including portfolio management, investment strategy and liquidity management
• Success looks like a defensible view, expressed clearly under scrutiny
• The stream a candidate pictures when they picture asset management

Distribution (Asset Management) stream

• Client-facing: consultant relations, tenders and relationship management
• Working directly with the institutional consultants and pension schemes that actually place mandates
• Success looks like a clear, credible answer under direct client questioning, not a stock pick
• The stream most candidates never think to apply to first

Distribution is not a junior sales job bolted onto the real work. Winning and keeping institutional mandates is how the firm's entire fee base survives, and the people doing it are managing some of the largest, most sophisticated clients in the industry, not cold-calling retail investors. A candidate who treats it as a fallback option, rather than a different career with its own skill set, will interview for it badly.

The near-identical posting that leads somewhere else entirely

The clearest version of the group-versus-subsidiary trap on this firm is not a shared divisional label, the way it is at the big banks. It is two separate job postings that use almost the same words.

The most recent recruitment cycle carried a posting titled Investment, Asset Management, based in London, asking for a 2:1 degree and a grade B at A-level Maths. It also carried a second, separately numbered posting, titled Investment, Institutional Retirement, also in London, asking for essentially the same degree class and the same A-level grade.

One leads into the asset manager. The other leads into the insurer's annuity and pension risk transfer business, a different part of the group entirely, with a different client base and a different day job.

It is a sharper version of a trap the hub on asset management firms already describes at the big banks, where one shared divisional label covers two different jobs. Here, two separate L&G businesses simply happened to name a stream "Investment" in the same cycle, and one extra minute spent reading the business unit on a posting is enough to tell them apart.

How the process runs

The last posted cycle for the Investment stream in Asset Management ran an eligibility screen on degree class and the specific A-level requirement, online testing, a recorded video interview, an informal networking stage with current graduates, and an assessment centre built around a line-manager interview, a short presentation and a group exercise. Distribution roles, judged from live postings for the stream, are assessed with the same broad shape but weighted more heavily toward how a candidate handles a client-facing scenario.

Across the wider graduate scheme, Legal & General's own future-talent page states plainly that most roles open to application in October, that assessment centres run in December and January, and that there is no fixed application deadline: the firm recruits on a rolling basis and recommends applying early to avoid missing out as slots fill.

What the firm will not tell you

What a first year looks like, by stream

1. Investment. Close to the portfolio from early on: building models, supporting a strategy or research process, and gradually taking on responsibility for a narrower piece of a much larger book than a single-strategy fund would ever hand a first-year analyst.
2. Distribution (Asset Management). Supporting live client relationships from the start: preparing material for consultant meetings, helping respond to institutional tenders, and sitting in on the conversations that decide whether a pension scheme places or keeps a mandate.
3. Private markets. The newest and smallest of the three, inside a business built mostly through the 2024 merger, closer to underwriting and asset-level work than to either of the other two.
4. Group functions outside Asset Management. Accounting, Actuarial, HR, Marketing, Risk and Compliance, and Technology all recruit through the same graduate scheme hub, a reminder that a candidate applying to "Legal & General's graduate scheme" without checking the specific stream can land somewhere far from investing altogether.

The jobs the graduate scheme does not advertise

Most guides to a firm this size talk as though the only jobs are portfolio manager and client relationship manager. A firm built to serve pension schemes and an insurer's own balance sheet carries a large amount of work that never appears in either category.

• Solutions and LDI specialists. Building and monitoring the hedges between a pension scheme's liabilities and its assets, the work at the centre of the firm's LDI franchise and the 2022 crisis above.
• Private markets underwriting. Valuing and managing the infrastructure, real estate and direct lending positions the 2024 merger brought in, a different skill from picking or tracking public securities.
• Insurance-linked investment roles. Managing the assets behind the group's own annuity book, to an insurer's regulatory and duration constraints rather than a pension scheme's segregated mandate.
• Risk, compliance and operations. Scaling with the size of the book the firm runs, recruited through the group's own Risk and Compliance stream rather than Investment or Distribution.

Preparing for what LGIM tests

A candidate who has read this far already has an advantage most competitors for the same seat will not: a plain, accurate account of why the 2022 gilt crisis happened, what changed in the firm's own name and structure in 2024, and the difference between the two streams they might be applying to.

The one explanation worth rehearsing before anything else

• Practise explaining liability-driven investment out loud, in one paragraph, without notes. It is the concept that separates a prepared candidate from an unprepared one here.
• Have a plain answer ready for why a pension scheme hedges interest-rate risk, not just what LDI is. The mechanism is half the answer; the client's reason for wanting it is the other half.
• Check which stream and which business line a posting sits in. The distinctions above are checkable in under a minute, every time.
• Have a specific answer for "why this firm" that is not "because it's big." The 2024 merger, the insurer relationship and the LDI franchise all give something concrete to point to.

Read the current story, not the old name

LGIM stopped being the name over the door in 2024, folded into a division Legal & General now calls Asset Management, run by a chief executive whose career was built in private markets rather than index tracking. What has not changed is the client base: pension schemes, insurers and other institutions, most of them there for liability hedging and steady mandates rather than a stock story, with the group's own insurance business as one of the largest clients of all.

Understand the 2022 crisis correctly, know which of the two graduate streams fits the work a candidate wants to do, and check the business line on a posting before assuming a shared word in the job title means a shared job. Those three things, more than any amount of generic interview preparation, are what separate a candidate who has read this firm's own story from one who has only read its old name.