Four super funds among top 100 asset owners globally

Four Australian superannuation funds are among the top 100 asset owners in the world, a study by Thinking Ahead Institute has found. 

In total, six Australian funds featured in The Asset Owner 100, which gathered data on the total assets of the top 100 asset owners around the world. 

These were:

• #37: Future Fund Management Agency (US$185 billion  in total assets)
• #43: AustralianSuper (US$169 billion)
• #71: Aware Super (US$107.5 billion) 
• #85: QSuper (US$96.5 billion)
• #94: N. M. Superannuation Proprietary Limited (US$86.2 billion)
• #100: TCorp (US$83 billion) 

The top spot in the list was also a pension fund: the Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) of Japan with US$1.7 trillion in assets under management. 

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In total, the 100 largest asset owners were now responsible for US$25.7 trillion, of which Asia-Pacific accounted for 36.1%, making it the largest region in this study. 

Pension funds managed over half of the assets under management in the list. In comparison, sovereign wealth funds (SWF) handled 36.7% while outsourced CIOs and master trusts managed 6.5%. 

“These big asset owners control the world’s most influential capital and hold great responsibility and growing influence in relation to their beneficiaries and to a widening group of stakeholders,” Roger Urwin, co-founder of the Thinking Ahead Institute, noted.

He added: “The research highlights that many of these asset owners act as universal owners – long-term, leadership-minded holders of portfolios that are exposed to the entire market and economy – and have a distinctive opportunity to contribute to real-world systemic change by contributing to a Paris-aligned future, consistent with net-zero emissions by 2050.” 

Broadly, pension funds dominated in North America where they represented 79% of assets, the report found, followed by the Asia-Pacific to a smaller extent with 53%.

In the Asia Pacific, 48.3% of assets were allocated to equities, followed by fixed income (37.6%). The average portfolio for the top 20 funds showed the highest proportion of assets were invested in equities, followed by fixed income securities and lastly, alternative assets.

Still, there was a slow decrease in the proportion of pension funds' assets and a slight increase in the SWF funds' assets in AO100 in the last five years, the report noted. 

Although the number of funds increased by two in the AO100 this year, the share of assets by pension funds fell to 55.9% from 60.8% in 2017.