Meet The Quiet Achievers

The Investment Team at CSC is motivated and energised by our purpose to look after and grow your superannuation savings with integrity and deep capability.  Here are some useful facts: 

• We have been managing superannuation for 100 years.^[1] We are a mid-sized, niche super fund, with A$60 billion assets, serving 700,000+ Australian public service and defence customers.

• As the first ever super fund in Australia, we’ve led the industry and established a global reputation with our focus and demonstrated follow through identifying and managing the short, medium and long-term risks to the sustainability of our customers’ savings over the entirety of their work-life journey.

• To do this we have invested a century of experience into our investment governance and operating model so that we are able to continuously innovate, stay ahead of the curve, and build a leverage-able peer and agent network that is global.  All of this means we are able to identify and robustly evaluate the best investment opportunities early, so that our customers can have confidence in the resilience and quality of the portfolios we build.  This is essential to help customers achieve a secure financial position by retirement, regardless of when that is or under what market conditions.

• We’re a very stable team of 18 internal investment professionals, with collective experience managing money in real time that spans over 300 years!  The senior members of the team have been working together for more than a decade.  By selecting and partnering with around 90 external specialist managers, we ensure that the best global team is working for you.

The investment team at CSC is motivated and energised by our purpose to look after and grow your superannuation savings with integrity and deep capability. It is important to us that this capability is recognised independently, to ensure that you can have confidence that we do what we say we will do.  Awardsfrom the United Nations, AsianInvestor, the Responsible Asset Allocator Initiative and others recognise our unique combination of global best-practice governance and innovation.

• When we talk about ‘governance’ we’re not referring to compliance.  Our “Governance framework” is our operating model.  It describes how we take decisions; the investment opportunity set over which we can invest in; the types and amount of risk we can and cannot take; the ways that we expect to generate returns; how we value markets; the catalysts that we monitor.  Critically, we all have clear accountabilities for executing and monitoring our strategies across each detailed segment of the portfolio.  This framework gives us the discipline and courage to identify, price, manage and exit risk with precision.

• Innovation doesn’t mean we’re chasing the latest fad, or fastest trending hashtag. Innovation is about nimble decision making to take advantage of the best ‘value for money’ opportunities and proactively prepare for emerging risks.  It is about having the processes, controls and signals in place to allow us to confidently move into sectors, opportunities and assets early before others recognise their value.  

Every CSC investment-team member is accountable for the performance of the entire fund, not just their corner of it. We are a team of risk managers, transparent in our responsibilities, our risk budgets, and our complementary capabilities.  Together, we are accountable to you.

This combination of acute attention to- and accountability for detail, plus the well-controlled and transparent support required to be first into ideas means we maintain our competitive edge to access and steward high-quality assets for your portfolios. For further detail, please visit Our History of Innovation page.

^{[1] It all started with the 1922 Scheme, serving federal public servants – and, after several name changes and restructures, became the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation in 2011. We are still loyally serving Australians today as we have done for a century.}