From Institutional Investor, March 6:
Infrastructure has been a cornerstone asset class for years in Australia and Canada. Now, more investors are viewing it the same way.
After 17 years consulting on private markets for Willis Towers Watson, Luba Nikulina felt disillusioned with asset management.
“I became one of the biggest skeptics of the value that we deliver as an industry. I just have seen so many managers out there and so many structures that are not aligned,” Nikulina told Institutional Investor.
In 2022, Nikulina left WTW to work for an asset manager that had the alignment she wanted: $140 billion IFM Investors, which was created and owned by pension funds. Now as the head of strategy at IFM, she is trying to bring some of the things the Australia-based firm does best to more parts of the globe, including a “completely different ethos” and its experience with infrastructure. “Despite being a bit skeptical of our industry, I still think there is a massive role that we are playing and, with the help of capital, creating change in society,” she said.
The timing is good for IFM, according to Nikulina and a recent report by her. Infrastructure has been thought of as a standalone asset class in Australia and Canada for decades and popular with the local pension systems. It has become a “mainstay of pension portfolios in both countries due to its ability to act as a natural inflation hedge and its lack of correlation with returns generated by listed equity and debt,” according to the report. For those same reasons and others, more institutions beyond those in Canada, Australia and parts of Europe, are considering increasing their investments in the area....
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