Cbus appoints new CIO, aims for 50% in-house IM | Australian Markets

Big construction industry fund, Cbus has trumpeted the soundness of its inside investment staff on the similar time as asserting the departure of its long-serving chief investment officer, Brett Chatfield who’s being changed by Leigh Gavin.

Chatfield is departing the fund to take up a CIO function at a non-public household workplace and the fund paid tribute to his contribution together with being accountable for bringing a substantial slab of the fund’s investment management in-house.

His successor, Gavin, comes with a sturdy industry funds pedigree having joined the fund in 2023 after being Head of Investment Model Design at AustralianSuper previous to which he was chief investment officer at LUCRF Super and having earlier involvement at Frontier Advisers.

Interestingly, Cbus chief govt, Kristian Fok, is a former deputy director of Consulting at Frontier and the fund’s former CIO. He grew to become CEO in June, 2023.

“Leigh’s previous CIO experience, and skills honed managing local and global portfolios will allow him to build on our already strong investment foundations. Leigh’s tenure begins as the fund aims to deploy over $20 billion of our members’ savings in the next five years, where the aim is to deploy at least $5 billion for private markets and $10 billion for domestic investment,” Fok stated

He stated Gavin would oversee the launch of Cbus’ energetic large-cap Core Australian equities strategy and proceed to grow our inside world markets methods.

Fok stated that Gavin would additionally proceed to construct on the differentiated hybrid investment model (first overseen by Fok) “that has helped attract the best investment talent to Cbus, as the fund driven down investment costs”.

The announcement famous that Cbus was aiming to maneuver from a place of managing about 34% of its investments internally to 50% within three years.

It claimed that the Cbus investment expertise strategy was enjoying out pointing to the appointment of Matt Kempton to the function of Head of Equity Strategies, reporting to the CIO, who will start in August.

The adjustments within the investment management ranks have occurred much less than a yr after media criticism of Cbus based mostly on the departure of a quantity of senior executives.