The Guardians of New Zealand Superannuation were one of two global Sovereign Wealth Funds to be recognized at the Industry Innovation Awards held by Asset International’s Chief Investment Officer (aiCIO) magazine.

The Awards were held in New York on 1 December and brought together 150 global asset owners, consultants, asset managers and asset servicers, including the Ford and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundations, the Washington University Endowment, the Xerox and Boeing corporate pension plans, the Texas Teachers’ Retirement System and the Canada Pension Plans Investment Board. 

In the Sovereign Wealth Fund category, the finalists were the Guardians, the Alberta Investment Management Corporation, the Government of Singapore Investment Corporation and the Abu Dhabi Investment Corporation. Alberta won the award and the Guardians were runner up.

The Chief Executive Officer of the Guardians, Adrian Orr, said: "We are very pleased to be recognised among company of this quality, particularly as we are still building our capabilities in the investment area. It is also pleasing that this recognition is consistent with our mandate, which requires us to invest according to best-practice portfolio management."

The award process begins with self-nomination with the resulting pool narrowed to a finalist list by the editors of aiCIO and its advisory board. The Guardians’ entry cited a number of factors as evidence of Sovereign Wealth Fund innovation, including:

• A commitment to transparency to ensure stakeholders are aware of, understand and buy in to why we exist, what we do and how;
• The use of a Reference Portfolio to ensure clear, and publicly disclosed, differentiation between the absolute return of the New Zealand Superannuation Fund and the portion of that return directly resulting from the Guardians’ added-value investment decisions;
• The use of Strategic Tilting; and
• The use of the Investment Framework, instead of a Strategic Asset Allocation, to guide investment decision making (as explained in the 2011 Annual Report).

Also this month the Guardians 2010 Annual Report was a finalist in the public sector annual report category of the New Zealand Institute of Chartered Accountants’ Leadership Awards.

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For more information please contact: Paul Gregory, Head of Communications pgregory@nzsuperfund.co.nz, 09 308 2041, 021 274 9994