Meet the team behind the GPTB
Advisory board
Each member of the GPTB esteemed advisory board brings a unique perspective on the importance of transparency and reporting from all corners of the globe. Their feedback and ideas have been instrumental in developing this concept.
Keith Ambachtsheer
President, KPA Advisory Services; co-founder and board member, CEM, Canada
David Atkin
Chief executive, PRI, UK
Lorelei Graye
Founder, Adopting Data Standards, USA
Angélique Laskewitz
Director, Association of Investors for Sustainable Development, The Netherlands
Neil Murphy
Vice-president, communications, Investment Management Corporation of Ontario, Canada
Keith Ambachtsheer
President, KPA Advisory Services; co-founder and board member, CEM, Canada
“Real transparency is still a rare commodity in the pension industry. The GPTB initiative will help lift the veil on whether pension organisations are really creating value for their stakeholders.. Or not.”
Keith Ambachtsheer has been a participant in the pensions and investments industry since 1969. He is recognised as one of the globe’s most original thinkers on pension design, governance, and investing issues. Since its founding in 1985, KPA Advisory Services has become known as a trusted incubator for new thinking in pensions, and for providing strategic advice to a global clientele in person, and through the monthly Ambachtsheer Letter. CEM Benchmarking Inc., co-founded by Keith in 1991, has earned a reputation as the premier benchmarking organisation in the global pensions and investments industry.
Ambachtsheer was named “One of the Most Influential People in Pensions” by Pensions & Investments and has received many honours and awards over the course of his professional career. He is cited regularly in the world’s leading financial publications, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Globe & Mail. His editorials and articles have been published in the Financial Analysts Journal, the Journal of Portfolio Management, the Rotman International Journal of Pension Management, the Journal of Investment Consulting, and other professional journals. On the advisory side, he has played major roles in shaping and reshaping country retirement income systems [e.g., Australia, Canada, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands] and pension delivery organisations [e.g., ABP (Netherlands) , ATP (Denmark), CPP Investment Board (Canada), Ontario Teachers Pension Plan (Canada), Unisuper (Australia), USS (UK), WSIB (USA)].
In addition to being closely connected to the business side of the pension and investments industry, he has strong ties to its related fields in academia. aiCIO named him one of the globe’s “10 Most Influential Academics in Institutional Investing”, and he has helped guide the discourse in the field through a variety of academic positions, including:
- Executive-in-Residence and Director Emeritus, International Centre for Pension Management (ICPM),Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto
- Founding Editor, Rotman International Journal of Pension Management
- Founding Academic Director, Rotman-ICPM Board Effectiveness Program for Pension and Other Long-Horizon Investment Institutions
- Senior Fellow, National institute on Aging, Ryerson University
His fourth book, The Future of Pension Management, offers a progress report from the field, referencing case studies from around the world. Using the discipline of integrative thinking, the book shows how today’s pension challenges are best addressed. A Chinese translation was released by China Development Press in October 2017.
He has personal governance experience as a member of a number of corporate and not-for-profit boards, and has served as board chair of the Princess Margaret Cancer Foundation, and continues as a member of its Emeritus Council. He is a member of the Mercer CFA Institute Global Pension Index Advisory Council, the Georgetown University Center for Retirement Initiatives Scholars Council, the Network for Sustainable Financial Markets, and the Tobacco Free Portfolios Global Advisory Council.
David Atkin
Deputy chief executive, AMP Capital, Australia
“Transparency is one clear way to improve levels of trust in the community. By being open and transparent enables stakeholders to judge the success of the organisation in meeting their needs.”
David Atkin was appointed CEO of the Principles for Responsible Investment in December 2021. The PRI is a UN-supported organisation, with more than 4,500 signatories who collectively represent over US $121 trillion in AUM. He is responsible for the PRI’s global operations.
David Atkin was previously the deputy chief executive of AMP Capital and the chief executive of Cbus (the superannuation fund for the construction and building industry) for almost 13 years. In this role he saw membership grow from 500,000 to over 750,000 and assets under management from $12 billion to $55 billion.
Atkin is chair of SuperFriend a not-for-profit mental health foundation focused on creating mentally healthy workplaces, a member of the Australian Sustainable Finance Initiative Steering Committee (2018-2020) and has been appointed onto the Climate Council Board in November 2020.
Atkin was also the Australian asset owner representative on the UN PRI Board (2009-2015), an alternate director on the Australian Council of Superannuation Investors (2013-2020), a member of the Male Champions for Change Initiative (2018-2020) and a Pay Equity Ambassador on behalf of the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) (2016-2020).
He has a BA Hons University of Melbourne, Master of Arts Latrobe University and a Diploma of Financial Services and was recognised with distinguished alumni award from La Trobe University for his work in sustainable finance. He was awarded the FEAL Fund Executive of the Year in 2017 and ASFA Life membership in 2020.
Lorelei Graye
Founder, Adopting Data Standards, USA
“Transparency will ultimately serve to strengthen the pensions and investments world because we thrive when markets, operations (including costs) are efficient, accurately measured, and effectively managed”
A private capital markets advocate and investor, Lorelei Graye, has served public pensions in private capital for the past decade. A former public pension staffer and founder of the successful consultancy, Leodoran, Graye is president of the nonprofit alliance, the Adopting Data Standards Initiative (ADS). ADS represents some of the globe’s largest pensions, custodial banks, and providers for the advancement of common data standards to benefit operations of all private capital market participants. She brings over 20 years of experience with business degrees in finance and accounting, summa cum laude.
Angélique Laskewitz
Director, Association of Investors for Sustainable Development, The Netherlands
“Transparency is needed because pension funds play a major societal role globally.”
Angélique Laskewitz is executive director of VBDO: the Dutch Association of Investors for Sustainable Development. She has held various roles in change management, human recources and governance-related management and consulting roles at financial services providers such as RVS, AMEV, Fortis Bank Netherlands, BNP Paribas Fortis and ASR Netherlands. As a sideline she started her own consultancy practice Angélique Laskewitz Management & Consultancy (ALMC).
Neil Murphy
Vice-president, communications, Investment Management Corporation of Ontario, Canada
“Public stakeholders may form opinions based on formal disclosures, but they increasingly draw conclusions on what they don’t see, or what is omitted. So transparency is important.”
Neil Murphy is the vice president of communications for the Investment Management Corporation of Ontario (IMCO), which manages over C$70.3 billion of assets on behalf of its institutional and public sector clients. Based in Toronto, he oversees IMCO’s global communication strategy, including strategic direction for communications, issues management, public engagement, media relations, and branding initiatives.Throughout his career, Murphy has led communication teams for organisations in both Canada and the US. Prior to IMCO, he was a communications director at the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan where he led member and corporate communications initiatives for almost 10 years. Prior to joining Teachers’, he was vice president of corporate affairs for a public relations firm in Toronto and was previously communications director for The Cadillac Fairview Corp. Ltd., one of the world’s largest commercial real estate firms. He holds a Master’s in Journalism from Concordia University in Montreal and a Bachelor’s Degree in Political Science from St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.
Project team
Franco Wang
Amanda White
Editor of Top1000funds.com
Brenda Yuyitung
Product Manager
David Dupont
Manager, Production
Edsart Heuberger
Senior Research Associate
Daniel Griffiths
Analyst, CEM Benchmarking
Griffiths is an analyst at CEM Benchmarking. Prior to joining CEM Benchmarking, he was working for New Zealand’s stock exchange, NZX. Griffiths worked as an analyst across NZX’s capital markets and finance teams. He has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in Finance (Hons) and Economics from Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand).
Mike Heale
Principal, CEM Benchmarking
Mike Heale is responsible for global business development and client service for CEM’s investment and administration benchmarking clients. His personal clients include leading pension and sovereign wealth funds in Asia, Canada, Europe, the Middle-East, and the United States. He has been with CEM for 21 years. Heale has an undergraduate degree in Physical Health and Education from Laurentian University and an MBA from the Richard Ivey School of Business, University of Western Ontario. Prior to joining CEM in 1999, he had 12 years of pension and life insurance marketing experience. He started his career in education as a basketball coach and teacher at Laurentian University. Heale is a frequent speaker at global pension and investment conferences where he shares performance and best practice insights from the CEM research program.
Recent industry papers that he has co-authored include:
- The bright and dark sides of private equity investing
- The time has come for standardized total cost disclosure for private equity
- Private equity cost disclosure – a problem and the solution
- A hedge fund performance reality check
- Managing costs and optimizing outcomes (chapter in the book: Saving the Next Billion from Old Age Poverty)
He is the creator and leader of CEM’s Global Leaders Service, a research group consisting of leading global pension and sovereign wealth funds.
Mike Reid
Vice president, CEM Benchmarking
Michael Reid has client relationship responsibility for several clients in each of CEM’s services. Prior to joining CEM in 2017, he had a 16-year career in a wide range of roles within the pension industry most recently as a managing director at Manulife Asset Management where he worked with institutional investors in developing liability driven and real asset investment strategies. Reid spent the first 10 years of his career as a pension actuary and consultant in progressive roles at Towers Perrin and Mercer after which he joined Manulife where he headed the internal pension team with responsibility for the end to end governance of Manulife’s global internal pension arrangements. Reid served as a member of Manulife’s US pension and 401(k) investment committee and was secretary to Manulife’s Canadian and US pension committees. He has an HBS in Statistics and Actuarial Science from the University of Western Ontario.
Franco Wang
Director, CEM Benchmarking
Franco Wang is a director at CEM Benchmarking Inc. based in Toronto. He holds a dual role and is responsible for both client service in North America and parts of Asia, as well as performing custom analyses and research for large institutional investor clients. He was previously an analyst on the investment benchmarking service team where he developed an extensive familiarity with CEM’s proprietary database. He continues to leverage this experience to deliver insights to clients.
Prior to joining CEM Benchmarking in 2016, Wang was a senior investment consulting analyst at Mercer where he performed performance and governance analytics for Canadian pension plans.
Amanda White
Editor, www.top1000funds.com
Director, institutional content, Conexus Financial
Amanda White is responsible for the content across all Conexus Financial’s institutional media and events. She is responsible for directing the bi-annual Fiduciary Investors Symposium which challenges global investors on investment best practice and aims to place the responsibilities of investors in wider societal, and political contexts, as well as promote the long-term stability of markets and sustainable retirement incomes. She is the editor of www.top1000funds.com, the online news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. White has been an investment journalist for more than 25 years and has edited industry journals including Investment & Technology, Investor Weekly and MasterFunds Quarterly. She was previously editorial director of InvestorInfo and has worked as a freelance journalist for the Australian Financial Review, CFO, Asset and Asia Asset Management. She has been a columnist for the Canadian publication, Corporate Knights, which is distributed by the Globe and Mail and The Washington Post. White has a Bachelor of Economics from Sydney University and a Master of Arts in Journalism from the University of Technology, Sydney. White is currently a fellow at the Finance Leaders Fellowship Program at the Aspen Institute. The program consisting of 22 fellows seeks to develop the next generation of responsible, community-spirited leaders in the global finance industry.
Top1000funds.com is the market leading news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. Focusing on investment strategy and implementation, Top1000funds.com is populated by original news stories, case studies and research that relates directly to the work of investment professionals at pension funds, endowments and sovereign wealth funds. In addition to in-depth profiles of large institutional investors’ investment strategies, the content analyses the most innovative and up-to-date investment thinking and strategy via close association with the portfolio management, finance academic and practitioner communities.
CEM Benchmarking is an independent provider of cost and performance benchmarking information for pension funds and other institutional asset owners worldwide. It believes ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and is deeply committed to helping clients run cost-effective operations that generate value for their stakeholders. With vast industry knowledge and a robust database spanning 28 years and $10+ trillion in AUM, CEM helps more than half of the world’s top 300 pension schemes understand and manage their costs and performance. CEM also facilitates better pension outcomes by sharing cutting edge research derived from its proprietary databases.
“Transparency is the first step towards accountability.”
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CEM Benchmarking is an independent provider of cost and performance benchmarking information for pension funds and other institutional asset owners worldwide. It believes ‘what gets measured gets managed’ and is deeply committed to helping clients run cost-effective operations that generate value for their stakeholders. With vast industry knowledge and a robust database spanning 28 years and $10+ trillion in AUM, CEM helps more than half of the world’s top 300 pension schemes understand and manage their costs and performance. CEM also facilitates better pension outcomes by sharing cutting edge research derived from its proprietary databases.
Top1000funds.com is the market leading news and analysis site for the world’s largest institutional investors. It focuses on leading the global investment industry to continuous improvement through case studies of best practice in governance and decision making, portfolio construction and efficient portfolio management, fees and costs, and sustainable investing. The publication pushes the industry to question whether status quo processes and behaviours to tackle risks and opportunities will be sufficient in the future, and actively campaigns for diversity, sustainability, transparency, innovation and better alignment of fees in the investment industry. Top1000funds.com is read by investment professionals in more than 40 countries.
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