The Global Pension Transparency Benchmark is promoting transparency for better pension outcomes.

Pension funds and other asset owners worldwide are striving to adopt higher transparency and disclosure standards for the benefit of their stakeholders. Where is your fund in this journey? More importantly, how will you keep up with industry best practices?

The Global Pension Transparency Benchmark is a world first global standard for pension disclosure, bringing a focus to transparency in a bid to improve pension outcomes for members.

The GPTB ranks 15 countries on public disclosures of key value-generation elements for the five largest pension fund organisations within each country. The GPTB focuses on the transparency and quality of public disclosures with quality relating to the completeness, clarity, information value and comparability of disclosures.

The overall country and fund scores look at four factors: governance and organisation; performance; costs; and responsible investing, which are measured by assessing hundreds of underlying components.

At CEM, we also offer our own services in Transparency Benchmarking. The CEM Transparency Benchmark is a comprehensive assessment that covers major impact areas and consider critical goals in your transparency journey. You can read more about our transparency benchmarking services here.

The Global Pension Transparency Benchmark is a world first global standard for pension disclosure, bringing a focus to transparency in a bid to improve pension outcomes for members.

The GPTB ranks 15 countries on public disclosures of key value-generation elements for the five largest pension fund organisations within each country. The GPTB focuses on the transparency and quality of public disclosures with quality relating to the completeness, clarity, information value and comparability of disclosures.

The overall country and fund scores look at four factors: governance and organisation; performance; costs; and responsible investing, which are measured by assessing hundreds of underlying components.

This report examines the domestic vs. international breakdown of investments for Canadian pension funds, and barriers to domestic investment. It finds the proportion of Canadian listed equity and fixed income holdings is relatively high compared to the global share of Canadian assets, but has come down dramatically in the last ten years. Citing examples from Australia and India, the authors highlight opportunities for Canadian governments to monetize strategic assets and lure more investment from Canadian pension funds and others.

CEM research shows that institutional investors of sufficient size tend to outperform the market over long periods of time. The ability to outperform benchmark returns stems partly from the structural advantages; investors with more scale, more actively managed assets, and more assets managed in-house tend to outperform. However, what sources of value lay at the investment level?

Here, we focus on the real estate market, demonstrating that real estate as an asset class offers the potential to add value both in listed and unlisted real estate. Average investment costs in unlisted (i.e., private) real estate exceed the gross value added generated, meaning that institutional investors, on average, underperform their benchmarks net of investment costs. By contrast, for the average listed equity REIT portfolio, nearly half of the 84 basis points of gross value added is returned to investors, providing them with 32 basis points of value added, net of all investment costs.

This Georgetown CRI study, in conjunction with CEM, asks the question, “Should DC plan sponsors emulate DB plans by increasing or introducing allocations to illiquid assets within target date fund options?” This analysis focuses on the period 2011–2020 and assesses how DC plan participants’ experiences would have changed had DC TDFs made higher allocations to illiquid assets during this time. The results suggest the potential increase in returns may have been a missed opportunity.