Rest Super’s selective approach to PE pays off as program comes of age

Investment Magazine

Rest Super has built its private equity program around a deliberately selective approach to manager and deal selection, favouring a concentrated roster of external partners and proactively seeking out top private equity firms rather than waiting for them to come knocking. Now the five-year-old program is beginning to mature, with the $112 billion fund securing an asset class return more than double the peer average in the last financial year. Having joined from the Future Fund in 2020, head of private markets Marina Pasika, who built Rest’s private equity program from the ground up, says the fund has an intentionally different approach from peers since inception.

“The program’s only now starting to get into maturity – I’m not sure we can even call it mature yet – it’s starting to look the way that we would actually expect it to look on an annual basis,” she tells Investment Magazine in an interview. “We’ve very intentionally built exposures to managers that we think deal on deal, fund on fund, can generate very strong returns, backed by genuine operational change and value add,” she says, rather than focusing on leverage or multiple expansion that the private equity industry has used to power its outsized returns. One manifestation of this selective approach to external partners is that Rest didn’t wait for good managers to come to its doorstep. It sought out managers investing in areas Rest is interested in, many of whom aren’t travelling to Australia or even looking to raise new funds.

The rest of this article can be found at investmentmagazine.com.au.