Russell Investments makes key appointment for index business

Industry veteran Shelton (Shellie) Unger will lead Russell Index sales & relationships with retirement plan sponsors, foundations and endowments

Seattle, WA — — Russell Investments has appointed Shelton (Shellie) Unger as director of plan sponsor sales for Russell Indexes. Unger, who has more than thirty years of financial services experience, will lead a focused initiative to introduce the full depth and breadth of Russell Indexes’ product and service offering to the plan sponsor community in the U.S., including foundations, endowments and consultants. She joined Russell on July 18th, is based in the firm’s New York office and reports to Kevin Lohman, managing director of sales for Russell Indexes.

“With the significant challenges plan sponsors face today such as increasing market volatility, decreasing funding ratios and the uncertain market and investment climate, retirement plan sponsors need access to high quality benchmarking tools to make well informed asset allocation decisions,” said Lohman. “Shellie brings incredible insight into the needs of the plan sponsor community with a proven track record of building and motivating world class service teams to address these needs.”

Prior to joining Russell, Unger spent twenty-five years with Vanguard where she helped build a variety of successful business teams serving different aspects of the institutional retirement market. Her assignments at Vanguard included client service, operations, strategic planning, institutional sales and marketing, participant education, online strategy, international and nonprofit sales and global consultant relations. At Russell, she will lead the effort to grow awareness and expand partnerships among existing and new plan sponsor clients in the U.S., encouraging them to utilize the full depth and breadth of Russell Indexes’ benchmarking capabilities.


About Russell Investments

Russell Investments is an independent, global financial services firm that provides strategic advice, investment solutions, implementation services and global performance benchmarks that are customized to meet the unique needs of institutional investors, financial advisors and individuals.

Celebrating its 75th anniversary in 2011, 25 years in Sydney and Tokyo and 15 years in the Netherlands, Russell has pioneered innovations that have come to define many of the practices that are standard in the investment world today, and has four decades of experience researching and selecting money managers globally.

Russell has about $161 billion in assets under management (as of 3/31/11) and works with 2,300 institutional clients, 530 independent distribution partners and millions of individual investors globally. As a consultant to some of the largest pools of capital in the world, Russell has $2 trillion in assets under advisement (as of 12/31/2010) and traded $1.4 trillion last year through its implementation services business. The Russell Global Indexes calculate over 50,000 benchmarks daily covering 85 countries and more than 10,000 securities.

Founded in 1936, Russell is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA and has offices in Amsterdam, Auckland, Chicago, London, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Paris, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, Sydney, Tokyo and Toronto. For more information about how Russell helps to improve financial security for people, visit www.russell.com.