The Fiduciary Investors Symposium was held in May in Toronto. Conexus Institute executive director David Bell shares his reflections through the lens of a researcher focused on Australia’s superannuation system and a former pension fund CIO, and someone with a strong academic background in all things investment and pension related.
Innovation comes from collaboration, not from building silos, the Fiduciary Investors Symposium has heard. Leading academic Redouane Elkamhi told the symposium the boards of pension funds should create structures that allow investment teams to actually do what they are asked to do.
What was once too intense to be utilised by computing processes, reinforcement learning has become a viable tool for asset owners. John Hull, Maple Financial chair in derivatives and risk management at the Joseph L. Rotman School of Management, told the Fiduciary Investors Symposium this now outperforms simpler modelling approaches.
Despite global pension markets’ varying levels of maturity, the goal of combining portfolio resilience with meeting fund objectives is the same, and it can be achieved through different manifestations of governance structures.
For asset owners to stay the course of a long-term investing view, not only do their investment teams need to be behind the objective, but also their board and external managers. Or investors might find themselves fighting an uphill battle in a market where short-termism is prevalent.
The power of artificial intelligence to makes sense of huge volumes of data and produce real business gains has obvious appeal for asset owners. Working out how to apply the technology can be overwhelming, but the Fiduciary Investors Symposium heard that the most important thing is to start.
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