Damian Graham, chief investment officer of the $190 billion Aware Super, will step down from the position at the end of the year to take up the role of head of international, based in London, as he transitions to retirement from the fund.
Aware has launched a global search for a new CIO. Graham has led the investment team at Aware for 12 years and in his new role will report to the yet-to-be-named CIO, who will remain based in Sydney.
A spokesperson for Aware said Graham’s move to London was part of a plan 12 months in the making to allow Graham to step back from the day-to-day duties of CIO and to facilitate his eventual transition to retirement while retaining his experience and intimate knowledge of Aware and its culture.
Aware’s current head of international, Damien Webb, will return to Sydney later this year in a move Aware said was also long planned. The spokesperson said Webb had not necessarily been anointed as Graham’s successor.
In a statement, Aware chief executive officer Deanne Stewart said Graham’s “carefully managed transition” was part of its plan to build out its global presence.
“Aware Super welcomes this opportunity to build upon our leadership team with a new CIO that will continue the growth of the fund as we aspire to help our members plan and live their best retirement through delivering super returns and being super helpful when they need us,” Stewart said.
Graham said he was “excited and invigorated by the opportunity to continue with the Fund and lead our global operations”, and that he was “proud of what we have achieved” over the past decade helping Aware members secure their own retirements.
Neither Stewart nor Graham were available for interviews yesterday. At the Investment Magazine Fiduciary Investors Symposium in May last year, now revealed as having been during the early stages of planning for this move, Graham hinted at how he viewed his role, saying CIOs “have important jobs, but we’re not important people”.
“You just hold a role for a period of time,” Graham said.
“The CIO of our fund is not my job; it’s a job I’m doing at the moment.
“The really critical issue is…are we delivering great outcomes to members?”
Graham told the symposium that Aware had set up the London investment office because “we felt, as we got larger for private market assets particularly, we were going to struggle to attract as many as we wanted to”.
But he acknowledged that while there were plenty of pros, there were also some cons to managing a business on the other side of the world, including that “for two thirds of the year I have a leadership group meeting that starts at eight o’clock at night” in Sydney.
Reconfiguring
The changes at Aware are the most recent illustration of how major superannuation funds are reconfiguring their investment teams to ensure portfolios remain resilient in the face of volatile markets, uncertainty over inflation and interest rates, the anticipated impact of AI and increased geopolitical uncertainty.
This week the $100 billion Cbus Super announced the departure of Brett Chatfield as CIO and the promotion of his deputy Leigh Gavin.
Chatfield, who has left Cbus after 12 years with the fund to take up a role outside the industry superannuation space, was appointed Cbus CIO in June 2023, when the fund was $83 billion, replacing Kristian Fok, who had been appointed chief executive officer. Gavin joined Cbus in 2023 as head of investment model design from LUCRF Super, where he was CIO, and after a stint as a consultant at Frontier Advisors.
Gavin’s ascension also coincided with the appointment of former deputy CIO at Funds SA Matthew Kempton as head of equity strategies.
The changes cap an active couple of years for Cbus as it built out its investment team. The fund has also hired Justin Pascoe as head of portfolio construction, following a stint at AustralianSuper and as former CIO of VFMC; and Jordan Kraiten, who had spent more than a dozen years at HostPlus and in 2024 was promoted to Cbus head of private markets and infrastructure.
The fund also hired Nikki Panagopoulos as senior investment director, property; Xia Wu in its global equities team; Ryan Riedler as head of ASX core strategy in Australian equities to focus on active large-cap Australian equities; and Angela Ruchin as senior investment director.
But Cbus is far from alone in reorganising the upper ranks of its investment team, and even high-performing teams are not immune from the need for constant renewal and reinvention. It’s happening across the globe.
A report released this week by Mercer, based on data collected from asset owners in 16 countries, suggests that asset owners are making pre-emptive changes to portfolios and investment teams in response to the perceived risks of heightened market volatility, significant geopolitical risks, persistent inflation and the rise of AI.
The report says a “significant proportion” of the asset owners surveyed say they are planning to invest to improve their investment capabilities over the coming year.
The 2025 Mercer Investments Large Asset Owner Barometer report says asset owners
acknowledge they need to “commit meaningful resources or operational expenditures over the coming year”, and that they also recognise the need to streamline governance.
“More than half of respondents say overly complex governance structures prevent their organisations from making decisions in the most agile and efficient way,” the report says.
In mid-April the $320 billion Australian Retirement Trust unveiled a reorganisation of the team reporting to CIO Ian Patrick, including moving Andrew Fisher into the role of general manager of total portfolio management and resilience, and Michael Weaver into the role of general manager of mid-risk assets and of the fund’s growing UK investment operations.
The raft of changes to ART’s team unveiled on 21 April were touted as being to “support the next phase” of its development, and to more closely align with “core functional groupings that underpin our current activities, aligning accountabilities with our integrated approach to managing portfolios and supports the continuing evolution of our operations as we strive to deliver world class investment capability”.
In addition to Fisher’s and Weaver’s changes of responsibility, ART appointed Elizabeth Kumaru as general manager of growth assets, Nicole Bradford as general manager of sustainable investment and planning, Jody Fitzgerald as general manager of defensive liquid assets and portfolio intelligence, and Fiona Freestone as business manager of the fund’s investment office.
The restructuring also saw the departure of head of public markets Greg Barnes and head of capital markets Herbert Chang.
Global expansion is also a catalyst for team changes and growth. The $365 billion AustralianSuper announced this week that its international equities team is to be bolstered by the addition of former Artemis head of global equities Alex Stanic. Stanic will lead AustralianSuper’s core equity investments and will join the fund later this month.
The fund made three other key appointments at the end of last year, hiring Steve Kelly as co-head of high-growth global equities, from AXA Investment Managers; Anu Narula as the other co-head, from Mirabaud Asset Management; and Colin Moar as senior portfolio manager, technology equities, from Barings.
These moves followed changes in the fund’s New York-based Americas team, which included the appointment of Mikaël Limpalaër as head of Americas and the relocation of head of private credit Nick Ward from Australia; and the appointments of Maria Reed as head of fund services, Damien Mitchell as senior investment director of real assets, Andrew Osborne as senior investment director of real assets, and Matthew Choi as senior investment director of private credit.
Filling gaps
Some opportunities to refresh teams and promote from within have been prompted not so much by changing market conditions but by filling gaps left by the retirements of specific individuals. For example, when Andrew Lill stepped aside as Rest Super CIO in October last year, after less than five years in the job, he was replaced by acting co-CIOs Simon Esposito, head of private markets and deputy CIO; and Kiran Singh, head of listed assets. Lill was appointed acting CIO of Legalsuper in March this year, replacing Paul Murray who had left the firm in December after being in the role only nine months.
But Rest has also been building out its internal investment capability. Its internal global equities team started live trading in March and a spokesperson for the fund says it has built a team of five people over the past 18 months to get there, with Olivia Salmon and Anna Chen starting in September last year and Chris Hillsdon in August before that. These three joined Fredy Hoh and team leader Richard Mercardo.
Also following the departure of a CIO – in this case, Graeme Miller – TelstraSuper promoted Kate Misic to the role in an acting capacity, while the fund’s merger with Equip Super proceeds.
The changes taking place are designed to ensure teams and investment operations remain fit for purpose and that they offer the best chance of navigating uncertain waters.
The Mercer report says asset owners mostly believe their portfolios are “fairly resilient” to weather the storms likely to be thrown up by a range of factors, but fewer say their portfolios are “very resilient”.
Generally, the longer the time frame the fewer asset owners who believe their portfolios are either very or fairly resilient.
| How resilient do you believe your portfolio is in its ability to withstand the impact of the following issues: | ||||
| Next 12 months | Next three to five years | |||
| Very resilient (%) | Fairly resilient (%) | Very resilient (%) | Fairly resilient (%) | |
| Foreign exchange moves | 24 | 65 | 23 | 66 |
| Interest rate changes | 24 | 59 | 24 | 58 |
| Private market valuation evolution | 23 | 55 | 19 | 55 |
| Climate change | 22 | 68 | 25 | 53 |
| Muted growth globally | 22 | 65 | 13 | 64 |
| Inflation | 19 | 50 | 17 | 61 |
| Regulatory change | 18 | 63 | 16 | 52 |
| Monetary tightening | 16 | 54 | 18 | 57 |
| Volatility in valuations | 14 | 59 | 19 | 61 |
| Volatility in public markets | 8 | 66 | 9 | 68 |
| Geopolitics | 7 | 58 | 5 | 57 |
| Challenged public market outlook | 4 | 70 | 9 | 62 |
| Note: figures show percentage of respondents. Source: Mercer Investments Large Asset Owner Barometer 2025 | ||||
The report says even though asset owners believe that AI is likely to be “the definitive long-term factor set to shape the macro environment over the next
five to 10 years”, only a minority has implemented or developed formal AI or generative AI policy and only half of respondents expect that they will over the next three years.
“However, this group of investors has taken proactive steps over the past year to protect portfolios from inflation and liquidity risks while adjusting their geographic asset exposures,” it says.
“With most large asset owners confident that their portfolios are resilient to a private market valuation evolution, nearly half of respondents increased their allocations to private markets in the past 12 months.”
