Data is our biggest challenge: Aware Super

Aware Super is around 18 months into a two-year project to ensure it has more robust and reliable data which can be used to inform better investment decisions.

In March 2023, Aware Super head of income and markets Michael Clavin spoke to Financial Standard about Project Odin - an initiative the fund was planning to strengthen its internal management foundations and drive growth.

Two years on from that discussion, speaking at the AM Tech Day event in Sydney today, Clavin said the fund faced an uphill battle at the beginning.

"Data was probably our biggest challenge. There was a view that we were going to have more internal management. We wanted to look at things with a total portfolio approach, and we had a growing amount of our assets that were in private markets, managed both internally and externally," Clavin said.

"When we looked at the data that we were receiving, the gaps were quite significant. Whether it was an over reliance on custody data that wasn't fit for purpose for the investment decision making process, or there was a lack of data around some of our unlisted assets."

Clavin said the fund wanted to centralise all the data and be able to feed it to the different operating platforms for the investment process.

"Those challenges were significant and took a lot of work," he said.

"We're working through those challenges still to this day, but we've made a lot of headway. When you look at the operating platforms that support large, complex asset owners, it's probably a never-ending journey.

"In hindsight, Aware probably wasn't as good at the continuous investment in technology. But that's why [the fund] has done this investment into its whole fund data, both public and private, and is working to put that together in a way that the people that look after the total fund from a risk perspective or return perspective could make decisions."

Clavin said it is a priority for the fund to ensure that its investment professionals are considering a total portfolio approach to ensure the best outcomes for members, and having reliable data around all its investments across asset classes has made a big difference.

"To me, it's that whole of fund, total portfolio approach that allows us to make better, more informed investment decisions based on well governed data across both our public and private asset classes. That is the key to unlock that value to our members. That's really the base of what we're doing," Clavin said.

"Once you get trusted data, well governed data, your need for [more] data kind of explodes, because suddenly people are saying, 'I trust this data, I can now start making decisions based on what I'm getting as output'.

"We're still in the infancy of that, but I've already seen growth in the expectations about what they can do with the data, which is really exciting."

Financial Standard is the official media partner of AM Tech Day.