Alison Tarditi is the highest paid chief investment officer in the 2024-25 edition of the Investment Magazine Salary Survey, taking home $2,089,828 in total remuneration for her role as CIO of Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation (CSC), which administers multiple schemes including PSSap and ADF Super. According to CSC, a significant chunk of that is accrued long service leave, which is included in her base salary of $881,349 – Tarditi hasn’t taken any long-service leave in 18 years – but the fund was not able to provide a breakdown.  
 
Rounding out the top three were UniSuper’s John Pearce, with total remuneration of $1,975,528 and Aware Super’s Damian Graham, with $1,962,366. That’s a slight reshuffle from last year, where Pearce took out the top spot and Graham was in second place. Graham has since departed Aware for the CIO role at the ASX-listed Challenger. 

But million-dollar pay packets are now common across the super industry, with Hostplus’ Sam Sicilia, Cbus’ Brett Chatfield, AustralianSuper’s Mark Delaney, HESTA’s Sonya Sawtell-Rickson, ART’s Ian Patrick and Australian Ethical’s Ludovic Theau all exceeding that threshold.  
 
Total pay is the combination of cash salary, short-term incentives and cash bonuses, deferred incentives, shares, one-off payment including termination pay, non-monetary benefits, superannuation and leave. The figures were extracted from funds and companies’ annual reports.   
 
One trend across the broad data set analysed by Investment Magazine and The Conexus Institute was for many CIOs to forego short-term incentives in the face of underperformance. A number of funds – including CSC, UniSuper and Aware – underperformed APRA’s simple reference portfolio of passive, low-cost liquid investments on a three-year basis, but Tarditi, Pearce and Graham still took home significant bonuses: $940,435, $453, 074 and $533,303 respectively.  
 
But just as the role of the CIO has changed to move beyond stock picking, so has the way they are remunerated. Super fund investment chiefs are no longer held to account solely by their investment performance but are now scrutinised on a whole range of so-called non-financial metrics which are increasingly being applied to the remuneration packages of public company executives around the world.  
 
“Our first quartile risk-adjusted returns, across all options, over long periods of time, testify to our strong investment performance. But no matter how good, investment performance at any one point in time is a single backward-looking measure, which is why the CSC board includes leading indicators in its assessment of our team,” Tarditi told Investment Magazine in an interview for the Salary Survey.  
 
“These include assessment of the skillsets, character and stability of the investment team, as an indicator of CSC’s capacity to steward these portfolios well into the future; and explicit consideration of the risks that reside within portfolios – we don’t want to “buy” near term returns by increasing the risk of failure in the future, given the range of environments that are plausible for our customers to live through before retirement.   
  
“CIO performance also includes contributions to improving the whole-of-organisation ability to deliver to CSC customer promise and retirement needs. 
 
“Without doing those things – optimising the investment portfolios for resilience; optimising the mix of internal versus external human capital and technology according to our particular comparative advantages; and contributing across all aspects of the business the capacity of the organisation to deliver to its customer base would be diminished.”  
 
Tarditi’s variable remuneration was based on both independent measures of investment performance – CPI objectives, risk-adjusted returns, peer relative returns, skill versus luck and APRA benchmarks –  and “early failure detection versus CSC’s specific investment strategy”, which the fund says differs from others in the superannuation industry by prioritising the achievement of the ASFA comfortable standard by every full-time member of CSC.  
 
“To exemplify the contrast, a fund could choose to prioritise the highest possible returns over three years (e.g. to compete for younger and/or more mobile members) while accepting a higher risk that members crystalise some capital loss if their exit is unluckily timed,” a CSC spokesperson told Investment Magazine.  
 
Tarditi’s other variable remuneration KPIs include funding ratios for defined contribution customers; objective indicators of portfolio resilience to an “unknowable future state that could materially reduce those ratios”; risk-adjusted returns, and relative performance under pre-determined market environments; pre-mixed non-default option relative performance versus peers; “innovation and early-mover payoff”; and strong team leadership and technology deployment to “enable high productivity from a small internal team”. 
 
“CSC’s board does not make simple comparisons of compensation relative to returns, believing that performance assessment should also consider the relative risks in each fund’s options,” the spokesperson said.  
 
“That is, CIOs should not just be rewarded for taking more risk with their customer’s retirement savings and getting lucky on markets. Rather, they should have a demonstrated capacity to add value in any market condition; build resilient portfolios; innovate for team productivity and endurance; and align their investment strategies to their customer’s needs.”  
 
At Aware, Damian Graham’s variable remuneration was also subject to a host of key performance indicators, including leadership, risk and the fund’s enterprise scorecard, which itself comprises metrics across its net promoter score, performance ranking, employee engagement, retirement measures and total cost to members. The variable remuneration of the broader Aware Super executive team is subject to the same KPIs.  
 
An Aware Super spokesperson said that the largest portion of Graham’s FY25 scorecard comprised investment return metrics for the fund’s main investment options across absolute returns, peer relative returns and the relative return of its lifecycle MySuper option, in which the majority of its members are invested.  
 
“These are measured over various performance periods for each investment option to ensure a focus on both short and long-term performance,” the spokesperson said. “The combination of the various metrics in Damian’s scorecard in FY25 meant that he was awarded most but not all of his variable remuneration. 
 
“APRA performance benchmarks are useful but they are based on simplified portfolios and don’t necessarily represent the lifecycle approach used by the fund and how we manage risk over the long term for the benefit of our members.” 
 
Approached for comment on how it awards short-term incentives, UniSuper confirmed that its incentive framework incorporates both individual performance – measured against defined objectives including investment performance – and overall organisation outcomes, which comprise “broader strategic priorities” including member outcomes, growth, transformation initiatives and people-related metrics.  
 
All of those metrics exemplify the broader shift in the responsibilities of super fund CIOs over the last decade or so. Funds have become bigger, and more complex; CIOs are managing investment teams of hundreds of people that work across a dizzying array of asset classes, and making sure that they are appropriately resourced and can access the right data and technology to help them make investment decisions is a huge part of the role.  
 
CIOs are also working in a significantly more complex regulatory landscape where they are subject to greater scrutiny from both internal and external stakeholders and must work hard at managing those relationships.  
 
“It’s a lot more complex,” said one CIO, who spoke on background to inform the scope of the Salary Survey. “There are many more moving parts.”