Government Pension Fund Global, Norway’s giant sovereign wealth fund, has topped the list of the most transparent funds in the 2023 Global Pension Transparency Benchmark, beating last year’s winner CPP Investments by only one point.
The highest scoring funds overall in the 2023 Global Pension Transparency Benchmark were also among the biggest improvers. Both Norway’s Government Pension Fund Global and AustralianSuper increased their scores by 14 points and were the biggest improvers in the top 10. Others included CDPQ, CalPERS, and PFZW.
The increased adoption of RI principles was clearly visible in this second iteration of the Global Pension Transparency Benchmark. Scores within the RI factor saw the largest year-over-year increase with the average score across all funds increasing by 6.9, so where were these increased scores most evident?
While funds around the world do a good job of disclosing governance frameworks related to financial and investment risks, as revealed in the GPTB, but what is best practice for communicating governance around addressing large, one-off events such as the impact of COVID or war?
Looking back at the portfolios of large institutional investors during and after the dot.com crash and the GFC, CEM Benchmarking, reveals commonality in the portfolios that thrived. For both events the top quartile returns were more than 2 per cent higher than the bottom quartile. Analysing the asset allocation and behaviour of investors showed two clear themes: top quartile performers had more defensive allocations pre-crash; and rebalancing is a tailwind for performance.
Active investing in US large caps has detracted value from US pension fund portfolios and exposures should be indexed, according to new research by CEM Benchmarking. This could result in huge cost savings and have implications for how pension funds spend their active budget.
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Global Pension Transparency Benchmark