NZ Superannuation Fund (NZS) has named long-time strategic tilting head, Alex Bacchus, to temporarily fill the gap left by departing chief investment officer, Stephen Gilmore.
Gilmore ends his more than five-year stint as CIO for the now $75 billion sovereign wealth fund this month to assume the same role at the biggest US pension fund, CalPERS.
CalPERS, which manages the pension money of Californian public employees, is over 11-times the size of the NZ fund with about $830 billion in the kitty at last count.
Bacchus has held multiple risk and asset allocation roles in the NZS after joining the fund from Goldman Sachs JBWere NZ in 2009 where he was director derivatives.
In 2014 he took over as head of strategic tilting, a dynamic asset allocation approach that has been the fund’s best active bet since inception, according to the 2023 NZS annual report.
“The Strategic Tilting opportunity contributed $935 million in value add in 2022/23, and represents the NZ Super Fund’s largest contributor to value-add since inception of approximately $4.6 billion,” the report says.
In fact, strategic tilting proved such a hit that the Accident Compensation Corporation fund followed suit in 2020, dipping into the NZS talent pool by luring then head of asset allocation, David Iverson, and local equities portfolio manager, Sam Porath, to repeat the magic.
The NZS has seen its two top executives leave within the last six months with Gilmore exiting soon after new chief, Jo Townsend, joined in January to replace the long-serving Matt Whineray.
Whineray is now chair of KiwiSaver, funds management and wealth advisory roll-up, FirstCape.
Townsend said the fund had begun recruiting for a permanent CIO.
Meanwhile, the NZS last week also appointed its master custodian, Northern Trust, to the intricate task of ‘data warehousing’.
Leon Stavrou, Northern Trust head of Australia and NZ, said in a release that the group’s Data Warehouse Solutions would help NZS “better consume, produce, and service their data needs, which is essential to generate the insights they need to continue to perform at a high level”.
Data warehouses enable organisations to consolidate, translate and interrogate information from multiple sources to produce business insights.
According to the release, the Northern Trust data service would allow the NZS “to scale as they transition away from legacy technology”.
Craig Cullen, NZS head of data technology, said the fund had worked closely with Northern Trust to develop a bespoke warehouse.
“We are pleased to partner with Northern Trust to build a data solution that will help us achieve our data management and analytical ambitions,” Cullen said in the statement.
The investment back-office arm of the US bank has served as global custodian for NZS from 2007 after winning the role from incumbent, BNP Paribas Securities Services.
In 2019 Northern Trust also picked up the securities lending responsibilities for the fund while its asset management arm also runs about $10 billion for NZS in passive or factor-based mandates.