Scottish Widows Investment Partnership is to open a fixed income office in New York in early April as part of its ongoing US expansion plans.

Neil Murray, SWIP’s global head of credit, is to relocate to New York to head up the new office. The first aim for the new operation is to build a US high yield business and to spearhead this the firm has appointed Kevin Mathews as head of US high yield. Mathews, who will join the firm in New York in March, has been a high yield fund manager for close to thirty years, working in both the UK and US. He was most recently head of high yield at F&C Investments, where he was also a high yield portfolio manager overseeing various global, European and US high yield mandates. Before this he was based in Arizona as a senior vice president for ING Investments.

Rounding out the high yield team are analysts Giulio Ponte, Tobias Lewis and Paul Lukaszewski. Ponte is currently an analyst in SWIP’s Edinburgh-based European high yield team; Lewis joins SWIP from Fidelity Management & Research in Boston, where he covered non-investment grade rated companies; and Lukaszewski joins SWIP from Brownstone Asset Management in New York, where he was an analyst responsible for researching US high yield and distressed debt securities.

SWIP has said that by June 2011 its US high yield team will be managing assets in excess of $900 million. In the UK SWIP manages some £68 billion ($110 billion) in fixed income and cash assets.