The $210 billion Aware Super has unveiled a “revamped” investment team structure that it says will strengthen whole-of-fund decision making, enhance portfolio resilience and tap into technological uplift.  
 
As part of the changes, the public market equities and defensive assets teams will now report directly to CIO Simon Warner, along with private markets, which is now a stand-alone division under Jenny Newmarch (heads of private market asset classes previously reported to Warner in his role as head of portfolio management).  
 
The fund has also created a new liquidity and market division – headed up by Michael Clavin, formerly head of income and markets – that will oversee the $19 billion cash portfolio and “harness the benefits” of its internal investment and data platform, which integrates listed and unlisted assets, internal and external mandates and real-time exposure and liquidity information into a single system. 
 
Now reporting into Warner are head of investment strategy Michael Winchester, head of liquidity and markets Michael Clavin, head of private markets Jenny Newmarch, head of defensive assets Sonia Baillie, head of public market equities Agnes Hong, chief operating officer for investments Justin Howell, and head of responsible investment Liza McDonald.   
 
“[The team] needs to have a level of representation of the portfolio, and we want to have a breadth of diversity of approach, thinking, background, education to bring all those good ideas to the table and make sure we can make the best calls as a group,” Warner tells Investment Magazine.
 
Warner says that the new structure is intended to determine, at the fund level, how liquidity, fee and risk budgets are being allocated – all of which feed into the crucial question of how the fund can outperform.   
 
“We’ve got three basic tools to outperform. One is that we can implement really well to maximise the return on our balance sheet. We can take more risk, which we can do through the SAA or, for example, the types of assets that we own in private markets. And thirdly, the hard bit, which is pure alpha – security selection, market timing, etc.”  
 
There will be no head of portfolio management or deputy CIO. Warner says that he wanted to create a mostly flat structure where different parts of the organisation come together to solve the “difficult problems”.  
 
“The difficult problems of the future are not going to be, in isolation, whether we have a good fixed income team,” Warner says. “It’s more about whether we’re optimising our cash book based upon what repo we can do, the collateral coming through from our derivatives, the FX rolls. 
 
“It’s those bits that fall in between the traditional boundaries where I think that there’s lots to be gained. And so having a flat structure where people are speaking peer-to-peer was very important.”  

Pockets of risk

Warner says the structure won’t vest all decision-making power at the top, but rather allow teams to understand where pockets of risk are concentrated and “empower as much as possible the experts making expert decisions”.  
 
“On the one hand, having everyone go off and do their own thing independently without any sense of how it rolls up into the whole is not really discharging our responsibility to do the best thing we can for our members. On the other hand, creating a top-down structure where people like me are making calls around CSL exposure or duration exposure feels crazy because I’m a generalist. We’ve got a great team of specialists who make great calls on that. 
 
“I’m definitely not involved in selecting individual assets within private markets, but if we started to drift to having 40 per cent of our infrastructure portfolio in digital, that’s something we would want to bear in mind relative to the other risks in the portfolio. That’s another example of the grey areas that fit between different responsibilities.”  
 
While news broke last week that Aware Super’s infrastructure team was considering a return to pooled funds after focusing on direct investments since 2021, Warner says that the fund will continue to pursue a hybrid approach to investing.  
 
“Our emphasis on that hybrid model over the last five to seven years has been building out the internal teams and building out direct assets in, for example, infrastructure, and building up that capability from zero to being really good,” Warner says. 
 
“That has earned us the right, because we can now manufacture our portfolio in an internal or external way, to be more selective and strategic about where we draw that boundary. We’ve got a great internal capability and where assets or parts of the market are aligned to that capability we should continue to do it and do a great job and not waste money for our members. 
 
“On the other hand, if you’ve got a specialised part of the investable universe – and given we’re constantly seeking breadth and additional return, we’re pushing into more specialised areas all the time where we might not have the expertise. And in those instances, whether it’s a sector, jurisdiction or a specific asset that comes with high levels of operating risk, we want somebody there to help us.”  

Aware Super’s new CIO Simon Warner will speak at the upcoming Fiduciary Investors Symposium in the Blue Mountains between 12 – 14 May 2026. The conversation will explore the realities of operating within an increasingly visible and closely examined sector, delving into management style, decision-making frameworks and how long-term investment discipline can be maintained through short-term noise.