This year’s top 10 stories included a peek into AustralianSuper’s international equities build out in London, AMP’s move to slash employee benefits, and plenty of hard-hitting analysis of the issues that matter in institutional investment. But the real story is how readers helped shape all of that coverage.
Orbis’ Stuart Place is riding from Melbourne to the Moon and Back to fund a treatment for the “monster of a disease” that his youngest son was born with. The investment industry is rallying behind him.
Ann Byrne transitions to retirement
Ann Byrne, the former chief executive of two big super funds who has headed up the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors for the past five years, has decided to transition herself into retirement.
Byrne, who ran STA, which merged with ARF to form what is now Australia’s biggest fund, AustralianSuper, followed by UniSuper, said last week that she would be leaving full-time work in October “to lower my golf handicap and see what life brings”.
She said: “I came to ACSI with a great deal of enthusiasm with what the organization does and I leave with the same enthusiasm for its future. We have made real progress on governance and the management of ESG investment risk. ACSI is recognized by companies, regulators and government as the voice of superannuation investors. At times they have not agreed with what we say but at no time have they said we do not have a point that warrants consideration.”
She will continue as a director of the refugee charity Oxfam Australia and “a few other ongoing appointments”, she said.
ACSI has 39 institutional investors as members – mainly Australian super funds – which speak for about A$340 billion of funds. The overseas members include CalPERS in the US and the UK railways pension fund RAILPEN.
Byrne became ACSI’s CEO in 2008, after she left UniSuper, and has built the organization up to a staff level of 10 people. The organization provides research, advocacy and voting services to its members.
