PSP Investments first appointed Eduard van Gelderen as Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Officer in 2018.Hand-out
Public Sector Pension Investment Board chief investment officer Eduard van Gelderen is leaving the $265-billion fund after six years in the job.
PSP said Wednesday that it has “mutually agreed” with Mr. van Gelderen on his departure, which takes effect on October 1. He will give up his day-to-day duties immediately, and the pension fund has named Alexandre Roy, a senior managing director in charge of total fund management, as interim CIO.
Mr. van Gelderen joined PSP as CIO in 2018, coming from the University of California, where he was a senior managing director in the CIO’s office. The Dutch-educated executive also held senior roles at APG Asset Management and at ING Investment Management.
Four of Canada’s seven largest pension funds have now changed CIOs since the start of 2023, following new appointments at Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Ontario Municipal Employees Retirement System (OMERS) and Alberta Investment Management Corp. (AIMCo).
Over Mr. van Gelderen’s tenure, PSP beat the internal benchmark it uses to measure its investment performance: its average annual return over the past five years was 7.9 per cent, compared with a benchmark gain of 5.3 per cent.
PSP, which manages pensions for the federal public service, the Canadian Armed Forces and the RCMP, earned a 7.2-per-cent return on its investments in the fiscal year that ended March 31.
In a June statement accompanying the release of those results, Mr. van Gelderen highlighted the fund’s positive returns “against a backdrop of the volatility of the last few years dominated by geopolitical uncertainty, inflation and rising interest rates.”
His departure is the most significant change to PSP’s senior management team since Deborah Orida took over as chief executive officer in 2022. Ms. Orida spent much of the past year crafting a three-year plan that aims to sharpen PSP’s investment focus, emphasizing a disciplined approach in markets that she expects will be volatile.
Last year, PSP also expanded its mandate after Ottawa chose it to manage the $15-billion Canada Growth Fund as a tool to attract a larger share of private capital being invested in the global clean economy.
Early in 2023, the pension fund’s global head of credit and private equity investments, David Scudellari, left to be the head of international investment at Edmonton-based AIMCo, and to build its credit business from a New York office.
