Hi, I'm Wendy Norris. I'm the Deputy CIO for Change and Innovation. I'm part of the Deputy CIO team which has three Deputy CIOs and the CIO. And together, we manage the investment portfolios for Future Fund which amounts to around $250 billion dollars.
In my new role as the Deputy CIO for Change and Innovation, we have tried to change the structure of the team to allow one of that team to focus on really making sure that we're staying on the cutting edge of decision-making, we are gathering all the best inputs into that decision-making process and we're continuing to evolve that.
So it's about talent acquisition and talent development. It's about making sure that the systems and the data and the technology are all supporting that process. It's about making sure that our operating systems are responding to what the Investment team needs as it tries to evolve.
FY22 was one of the quite challenging years to be an investor in what were very volatile financial markets. Listed equities had a very difficult year falling more than 15% but, not only that, bond markets also had a really challenging year with a similar fall and typically those types of asset classes move in opposite directions, not the same direction.
So for us the challenge was to be responsive in the market and to try and make sure that we're being as resilient with our portfolio as we could. Overall, we were really pleased to have an outcome that was roughly flat in that challenging year and in particular a couple of asset classes really shone. One of them was our alternatives portfolio, which is really designed to help buffer the performance in very volatile market periods, and also some of our private market assets have continued to deliver well in that challenging environment.
In addition to all the work that goes into the repositioning of the portfolio, I think the thing that sticks out to me the most is the way the team's come back together in a post-COVID working environment. People are showing up, collaborating in a way that we've really missed over the past few years. So we're getting out into the market again. We're meeting our peers, we're meeting our colleagues, we're attending conferences, we're starting to bring that whole sense of reconnecting the connections back together. And I think that for me is the standout for the year.
The priorities that we're focusing on across the DCIO team are a combination of portfolio and people issues. One of the biggest challenges that we're constantly facing is how we can engage with building the best portfolio – but to do that we need the best team and one of the key focus areas for us in the coming year is to make sure that we're really focusing on that strategic talent development, and also making sure that we're evolving our systems so that we can be on the cutting edge of feeding the right people the right market intel into our decision-making – and really making sure that our decision-making is the best it can be.
