Ontario Teachers’ promotes Grzinic as MD to lead insurance-linked securities

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) has promoted Bernard Grzinic to the role of Managing Director for Credit, Insurance Linked Securities and Equities within Capital Markets group, which will see him leading the investment teams for each of these areas.

The Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan (OTPP) is a long-standing investor in insurance-linked securities (ILS) and other reinsurance linked assets, seeing them as an attractive investment class with low correlation to broader financial markets.

OTPP is one of the largest pension funds in the world with approximately C $190 billion of assets under management and has been investing in the ILS market for more than a decade.

Grzinic joined Ontario Teachers’ in 1999 and has held a number of positions of increasing responsibility, beginning as a Portfolio Manager and then most recently as Director, Credit in Capital Markets.

Following the promotion of Gillian Browne, who took responsibility for the ILS investment operations at OTPP in 2017, to Senior Managing Director, Capital Markets in October this year, Grzinic has been promoted to replace her.

In the new role as Managing Director across credit, ILS and equities investments, Grzinic will have responsibility for managing risk allocation, oversight and strategy development to support the Capital Markets group in these asset classes.

“I’m very excited to have an expanded role in providing retirement security for our members-today and tomorrow,” Grzinic commented.

Of course, as we recently explained, OTPP has recently downsized its activities in the ILS investments space, pulling back from two of its ILS fund allocations, for a number of reasons in addition to the pure performance of those particular funds.

OTPP has broader concerns related to how catastrophe risks are priced currently, notably in light of climate change risks, as well as how catastrophe losses are reported and reserved for within reinsurance and ILS markets.

However, ILS remains a core allocation asset class for the pension fund and it’s likely that OTPP will look to other methods to deploy capital into reinsurance where it can either achieve a higher risk-adjusted return, or retain more of the margin on the underwritten business.