Japan’s Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) – the largest pension fund in the world – implemented numerous changes in 2014, including an asset allocation shake-up and the hiring of its first chief investment officer.
A new report says the reforms will benefit the fund going forward. From Chief Investment Officer magazine:
A report jointly published by Cerulli Associates and the Nomura Research Institute (NRI) stated that the reforms to the ¥130.9 trillion ($1.1 trillion) pension, announced by its management team earlier this year, would help it become “more dynamic.”
“In terms of hiring, the GPIF will not be shackled by low salaries and will be better positioned to recruit top-notch talent,” said Yoon Ng, Asia research director at Cerulli Associates. “This will add more quality to its external manager selection processes.”
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“With public pension fund reforms in place, the GPIF… may show a stronger tendency to hire managers with highly distinctive investment strategies that are differentiated from and relatively uncorrelated with other companies’ strategies,” the report offered.
Atsuo Urakabe, a senior researcher at NRI, said the new asset allocation would push the GPIF to hire managers with “highly distinctive investment strategies” that can offer uncorrelated performance, as it seeks to achieve a higher annual return.
Cerulli’s report said Japanese pension funds had been “bogged down by ultra-conservative investment policy requirements” but pointed to the GPIF’s reforms as an indication that other pensions in the country could revise their asset allocations, diversify, upgrade risk management, and reform governance.
As well as identifying external managers, Cerulli’s research paper predicted that Japanese public pension funds outside of GPIF may seek to build up their in-house expertise.
“In the long run, this will help to bring their costs down and lead to some insourcing of assets that had previously been farmed out to be managed,” the report said.
The GPIF manages $1.1 trillion in assets.
Photo by Ville Miettinen via Flickr CC License