Aware Super bolsters investment team

Aware Super today announced two senior hires to strengthen its investment leadership team as the fund continues its $250 billion growth pathA

Reporting to investment chief Damian Graham from September will be head of portfolio management, Simon Warner, and chief operating officer - investments, Justin Howell.

Warner will lead the development and delivery of the funds' portfolio management across the public market equities, private equity, property and infrastructure portfolios.

He joins from Macquarie Asset Management post the transition of the AMP Capital equities and fixed-income businesses to Macquarie.

Warner served as the global head of public markets at AMP Capital for five years.

He landed at AMP Capital in March 2007 and ran the fund's fixed-income business from 2014 to 2017.

Meanwhile, as operating chief for investments, Howell will lead the fund's investment enablement teams to support growth objectives.

A big part of his job will be overseeing strategy and business management activities such as business services, investment governance and direct asset management.

Howell has returned to the fold as while he most recently served as the chief operating officer at Pendal Group, he worked s head of strategy and operations for First State Super (Aware Super's predecessor fund) in 2017.

Earlier, he did a ten-year stint at Perpetual as a general manager of product income and multi-sector

Announcing the appointments, Graham said: "We are delighted to have attracted the calibre of these recent appointees who bring with them investment expertise to further fuel our growth ambitions, and leadership experience which will help us furnish a world-class investment team.

"As an active, global institutional investor and super fund, we are well positioned to continue to deliver strong risk-adjusted returns and lower fees for our more than 1.1 million members."

In the most recent performance reporting period, Aware Super delivered a 10.7 per cent return for its flagship default investment option, MySuper Lifecycle option, cementing its place as one of Australia's top-performing super funds.

The performance results also come at a time of immense innovation for the fund with two major digital transformation projects.

The first is the recent consolidation of five legacy technology systems into a single administration and registry platform, which has also unlocked many new products and services for members.

As the fund works to deliver further benefits of scale and lower fees, a second digital initiative for the investment team will see the creation of a data platform that will integrate projected increases across private and public market allocations and help manage the fund's goal of 50 per cent internally managed assets.