Impact investing has come a long way in the past two decades, going from a niche strategy to a $1.5 trillion industry, but there are still challenges for it to reach institutional scale due to the lack of products and insufficient evidence of outperformance in some parts of the market.
The global economy is increasingly bifurcated between the US, Europe and Asia and how the growth projections and geopolitical risks between these regions plays out is of increasing interest to institutional investors. The Fiduciary Investors Symposium in Singapore will look at the return and impact opportunities in the region, and the importance of Asia in the global economy.
It will examine the global economy in the context of the west adapting to a rising Asia; technology decoupling between the US and China; the impact of COVID-19 on Asian economies; the leading role of Asia in technology, smart cities, digitalisation and fintech; ESG risks and opportunities; and portfolio resilience to different macro-economic regimes.
The conference enables asset owners from around the world to explore investment themes, risks and opportunities with their global peers, and explore cutting edge approaches to risk management, liquidity management and portfolio construction.
While the dominant economic narrative has been that supply chains are shifting out of China amidst rising geopolitical competition and that the ASEAN countries are obvious beneficiaries, the truth is more nuanced.
While war weighs heavily on the world’s mind and its portfolio impacts are acutely felt by investors, celebrated geopolitical expert Stephen Kotkin said there is another thing that troubles him even more in today’s society: the "decay" of government performance.
Tokenisation of traditional assets will lead to a boom in on-chain trading, and that in turn opens the door to AI-agentic trading. But there are risks that AI agents may behave in unpredictable ways and, despite the hype surrounding the technology, still produce unexpected investment losses. In these cases, it will typically still be the CIO who bears responsibility – so they’d better understand what their AI agents are up to.
Some investors are “missing the point” of geopolitical risks by equating them to the disruptions from conflicts and wars, according to GIC chief economist Prakash Kannan, but in reality, geopolitical risk is no longer episodic or peripheral. This means investors need to think harder about inflation and country composition in their portfolio.
Long-time practitioners of the total portfolio approach said one of its greatest advantages is that the investment team can make significant asset allocation at its discretion, as interest towards adopting the framework picks up among asset owners to handle more complex decision-making. At FIS Singapore, GIC and OPTrust unpack the governance and risk culture to enable it.
The rise of artificial intelligence-driven trading has raised questions about the possibility of algorithmic investors crowding into many of the same ideas and amplifying stress during times of volatility. Nanyang Technological University computer science professor Bo An explores the question at FIS Singapore.
The Fiduciary Investors Symposium at Stanford University celebrates the fast-moving change taking place in economies and communities and will examine the impact of innovation on our lives, workplaces and investments.
This event looks at the challenges long-term investors face in an environment of disruption including ongoing geopolitical risk and shifts in global economy dynamics. By accessing faculty of England’s most esteemed university, this event will leave investors empowered to tackle disruption in their portfolios and working lives.
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FIS 2026 at Harvard University