After prioritising direct investments for years, the $210 billion Aware Super is considering a return to pooled infrastructure funds in an effort to broaden its opportunity set and boost returns, head of infrastructure Mark Hector told Investment Magazine.  
 
“We constantly look at our own returns and compare that to how we are against the MSCI benchmark, and we also compare ourselves to how we go against Chant West contributors,” Hector said.  
 
“Our infra returns have been pretty good, but we haven’t been at the very top. And there’s a desire to be one of the absolute top-performing funds across all sectors. And so the question has naturally been asked of how we go can go from being good to great.”  
 
Around 20 per cent of Aware’s infrastructure portfolio is currently in pooled funds, most of which it picked up through its various mergers. But Hector stressed that the “cherry” for Aware Super will continue to be large direct investments, saying that the fund can’t afford to tip too much money into higher-fee pooled vehicles and that it isn’t comfortable with the information asymmetry that arises from them.  
 
“We lose liquidity and flexibility and have certain objectives that, if we’ve got a seat at the table, we are more able to achieve. As much as you try and set up alignment mechanisms, the reality is that sometimes [GP] objectives can be different to those of their LPs.”  
 
Hector says that Aware hasn’t taken a “deep dive” into its strategy since he joined 12 years ago, when the fund was less than $30 billion and its infrastructure allocation was around $1.5 billion, most of it in a diversified listed mandate. Thinking around a pivot to pooled funds was kicked off by Simon Warner when he joined the fund as its head of portfolio management in 2023 and progressed as he took on the CIO role, and the team is getting close to a plan it can take to the investment committee.  
 
“It’s not going to result in a completely different strategy,” Hector said. “But we haven’t put anything into pooled funds over the last several years and we might have a small per cent of our capital that can tolerate going to pooled funds and having some higher fees there if it means we can get access to an even broader and better set of opportunities.”  
 
Hector said the move could “formalise” relationships with GPs it already invests with on an ad hoc basis and allow it to access opportunities that are usually shopped to LPs that already invest in pooled funds.  
 
“There are lots of GPs that haven’t shown us anything at all that are good quality GPs. You don’t know what you don’t know. You don’t know exactly what you’re missing out on because you don’t necessarily get all of that data. 
 
“Macquarie Asset Management is a good example of where we’re not in any of their pooled funds but, particularly in our own backyard, we’re one of their significant investors. They’re looking at some big and complex deals. They need people that are sophisticated, can move quickly and do take privates, and so we’re naturally a port of call.” 
 
Last year, AustralianSuper began to shift its focus back to investing in external funds due to concerns about underperformance of internally managed assets and its inability to compete with other investors for assets. Hector said similar pivots aren’t unusual in Aware’s history, with its current infrastructure program born out of an understanding that it would have to pay up to get better results.  
 
“The board used to have a strategy to be the single lowest cost fund within the Australian industry super market,” Hector said. “And then they realised that they were too focused on fees and not enough on net returns, and they kind of loosened the strings and the team started to expand and modernise.”  
 
Speaking at a panel at the Top1000fFunds.com Fiduciary Investors Symposium in Oxford last year, then-deputy CIO Damien Webb said that Aware Super’s growth had pushed the fund to “reinvent itself every five years” and that it was open to pursuing different “access points” for different asset classes as its needs change.  
 
“Our needs change, and our relationship with fund managers changes as well. We’re  on our way to be $400 billion and thought we’d do more and more directly, internally. We’ve done a fair bit of that. It’s really, really hard. It does make you a very sympathetic and empathetic investor. 
 
“But you also come to a point where you realise that, right now, with all the challenges around AI, you also want to stop and say to these GPs ‘how can you help us?’ Can I connect my head of HR to you, can I get our chief technology officer to talk to yours?’. It’s about the portfolio we want to own. The access points will vary, and the fee and risk budget hang off that, but it’s about the relationships and what we need and it’s very much shifting every five years as we grow.”  

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.