Russell Transition Management Services Earn Top Rankings From Two Industry Surveys (Russell.com)

Russell Transition Management Services Earn Top Rankings From Two Industry Surveys
Russell wins awards in all categories in surveys by Plan Sponsor and Global Investor

Tacoma, WA — May 22, 2007 — Russell Investment Group has again been recognized for its excellence as a transition manager, based on the recently announced results of two independent industry surveys conducted by leading institutional investor publications. Russell won "Best in Class" awards in all 16 possible categories in the Plan Sponsor transition management survey and won 65 total awards, more awards than any other firm. Russell also received "Top Marks" in every category — for the third year in a row — in the transition management survey conducted by Global Investor magazine. In total, Russell's transition management team has received more than 100 industry awards over the past three years.

"Russell is dedicated to providing the very best in transition management services for our clients with an emphasis on total return, best execution, fiduciary protection and complete transparency," said David Rothenberg, managing director, Russell Investment Group. "I am very proud of our extraordinarily deep and experienced transition management team worldwide, and we are honored that the industry recognizes Russell year after year for its expertise, ability and dedication to the client's best interest."

In the Plan Sponsor survey of over 600 plan sponsors, investment managers and consultants, Russell received top ranking in eleven "Best in Class" awards for Transition Services. The awards included "Best in Class" in number and expertise of personnel, confidentiality/lack of information leakage, interaction with transition stakeholders, timeliness of responses to inquiries, communication of progress, adaptability to emergent problems, identification of outliers, achieved expected total transition cost, clarity and comparability of pre-transition analysis, clarity of post-transition analysis and timeliness of post-transition report. In the Global Investor survey, Russell was again recognized as a top three provider of "Best Overall Service."

"Our transition management team continues to advance the state of the art in technology, strategies and techniques," said Brian Roberts, director, Transition Management, Americas. "For example, we recently introduced a liquidity scoring model, the first in the industry, that lets us quantitatively assess the relative difficulty of transition different fixed income instruments."

For more than twenty-five years, Russell has been at the forefront of improving and innovating transition management practices and techniques, leading the development of the T Standard as an objective performance measurement to aid clients in assessing a transition manager's performance. Russell continues to set the mark for delivering on T Standard-compliant investment performance of assets in transition.

Transition management is one of a number of services offered by Russell to help clients improve their net investment returns by providing efficient implementation tools to multi-manager portfolios. Other services include overlay services, commission management, agency currency execution, return-enhancing derivatives strategies (such as portable alpha) and short term investment funds. Russell's portfolio management and transition services teams operate worldwide with offices in Tacoma, London and Sydney.

About Russell
Russell Investment Group improves financial security for people by providing strategic advice, world-class implementation, state-of-the-art performance benchmarks, and a range of objectively researched, institutional-quality investment products.

With more than $200 billion in assets under management and about $4 trillion in assets benchmarked through its global indexes, Russell serves individual, institutional and advisor clients in more than 40 countries.

Russell provides access to some of the world's best money managers. It helps investors put this access to work in corporate defined benefit and defined contribution plans, and in the life savings of individual investors.

Founded in 1936, Russell is a subsidiary of Northwestern Mutual. The firm, headquartered in Tacoma, Wash., U.S., has principal offices in Amsterdam, Auckland, Hong Kong, Johannesburg, London, Melbourne, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto.

Contacts:
Jennifer Tice, 253-439-2921
Matt Burkhard, 718-875-2122

Russell Investment Group is a Washington, USA corporation, which operates through subsidiaries worldwide and is a subsidiary of The Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company.

www.russell.com/tm

RFD: 4674
First used: May 2007