GPIF

“It's GPIF that needs equities to perform to deliver on their pension obligations. So they realized that all of these complex relationships and conflicts in the Japanese financial services market meant that only outsiders could come and constructively cut some …”

“A lot of these stewards of the companies, primarily from Sumitomo Mitsui Trust Bank, ended up becoming the insiders in the GPIF, the Government Pension Investment Fund in Japan. These guys were the drivers of the governance upgrade in Japan.”

“Unfortunately, last year, we used the T-Safety framework and came up with a conclusion that our portfolio on the path of the three degree instead of two. And that means the world is on that trajectory.”

“We are passing ownership of those problematic business to the people who don't care about it. We don't want it to reduce the carbon footprint by divesting carbon heavy industry because it doesn't reduce the carbon footprint of the world anyway.”

“A lot of asset managers keep telling us, we do this much analysis on ESG, and we do this much analysis on this, and we hire this, we buy this information set, and I said, and in the end I said, how do you use it for investment decision making? And then a lot o…”

“I always find that this industry, we are very afraid of doing something new without having a clear concept of a measurement and a standardized data set. But I always think that in real world, you need to start it. But when we started, we need to make sure that…”

“And by the time I left, there are only two passive managers who proposed their GPIF, their new business model with specific KPI, how to improve their stewardship activities, and they received extra layout fees from the GPIF.”

“So we changed our evaluation scoring model. To allocate 30% of the total score to the stewardship activities in the evaluation of passive managers.”

“We just basically came up with the concept of, for our portfolio to become sustainable, We need to make sure the capital market to be sustainable, and for the capital market to be sustainable, we need to make sure society must be sustainable, and for the socie…”

“So we basically just said we are owner of the unique capital market universe. So we are universal owner. So our job is not to be the universe because we cannot. So let's see. What we can do to make that universe better.”

“I was a member of the trustee board at that time when the other, you know, GPI made a decision to change the asset allocation from the mostly Japanese government bond to half equity portfolio.”

“What I decided to do is I tried to change people's mindset. We had been spending a lot of time and energy on something which actually makes marginal difference. Why don't we try to spend time to make the real difference, which is trying to contribute and do th…”

“Well, the point is, most of the big asset owners, let's take public pension fund as an example, GPF, Culpers, Coasters, and all the big public pension funds, their most critical decision In terms of the financial performance of their portfolio performance is n…”

“If I look at the long-term performance of all the big asset owners, I mean, big or small, their performance pretty much dictated by what happened to the global economy. Or the global stock market. I concluded that we probably think the way to change that or ma…”