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Raphael Arndt

lines on the record: 110
first: 2025-09-01
most recent: 2025-09-01
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“So I would say I came in part way through that process. The fund had been established through an Act of Parliament in 2006. The board had been appointed and the board was just getting down to appointing a team that hired a CEO, a person called Paul Costello, who also had been involved in establishing New Zealand Super and very wisely made the decision that it was better to build the back office and the custody system and the legal approach first before you started hiring investment people because believe it or not investment people want to start investing straight away. So it wasn't until around the middle of 2007 that David Neal was appointed as the CIO and he came from an asset consulting background and so I think he's very good at strategic thinking and he really had a very strong philosophy that he built together with Paul which was”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a unique situation, really, because what we had was a new business, really a startup being formed, but with $60 billion on the balance sheet. And so that was a pretty exciting place to be and a great opportunity, which I was very strongly attracted to in terms of the infrastructure role. But also it gave us the opportunity to create a new way of investing large institutional long-term money from scratch with no legacy systems, no clients, and just Blue Sky. So I was brought in to do the infrastructure role and very quickly I also inherited this responsibility for selling down $10 billion of Telstra shares, which I didn't know all that much about at the time, but quickly learned. And I did that job for about six or seven years establishing the portfolio and the team and the approach. And then through some internal changes, my boss, the CIO, became”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if you include all the inflows over a year or so, it was about $60 billion Australian dollars of which about $50 billion was in cash. 10 billion was in Telstra shares that were still in escrow and were not allowed to be sold for two years.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the government was faced with the great problem of saying, what do we do with the money? Do we up our spending, albeit that we don't think this situation may be sustainable? Like many, many governments had had a series of pension fund obligations that were unfunded. And so instead it decided to establish the fund to invest that money, but also they privatised Telstra, the main telecommunications company around that time. And the bulk of the money in the future fund actually came from the proceeds of that sale. And set up an organisation to invest that money with a view to allowing the government to draw down in the future to offset the unfunded pension liability.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So in the early 2000s, Australia had benefited from some degree of the resource boom as China emerged and through a combination of that and economic management by the government at that time, the federal government budget was in surplus and was expected to be in surplus and the government had been paying down the federal government debt to the point where the industry started to get concern that all the bonds would be retired and there'd be no reference rate for the industry.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I never wanted to do that for a living either, but it was some good skills and I certainly learned how to articulate a complex message clearly. And again, I met a lot of people. And so a couple of years later, I was actually able to move to parole for a boutek infrastructure fund management business called Hastings Funds Management, which was based here in Melbourne, and then spent seven years there learning the trade, learning how to be an investor. And so by the end of that time was the portfolio manager for one of their unlisted infrastructure funds. And again, through LAC, I would say of timing rather than anything else, that happens to be the time that the future fund was being established and among other things they were looking for to head up their infrastructure team.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not because I want it to be an academic, but because I thought it was an entrance into an industry that was just starting and I could make lots of people. And as it happened, I ended up working very closely with the State Treasury through that time on infrastructure policy and meeting a lot of people in the industry. So I was lucky enough when I finished to get a job through some people I met as, I guess in the US what you might call a lobbyist, but it was really a policy driven role for an industry advocacy group.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was a much more novel concept in the early 90s than it is today Appeal to me because it was not just within my technical wheelhouse, but because it had elements of law and politics and social services and finance that. Been exposed to and interested me. So I decided that was an area I wanted to get into, but it wasn't really an industry. So I started asking And eventually decided, believe it or not, to actually leave my job and go and do a PhD on private infrastructure policy”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it's an interesting journey in my case. It certainly wasn't something I planned from early in my career. I actually started by studying civil engineering and economics. Started life as a civil structural engineer, spent some time in the UK with a consulting firm and ended up designing oil platforms of all things. And then came back to Australia and decided that the future career in engineering while it was there for me was probably not stimulating enough compared to what I was interested in. Because I'd done economics and a bit of finance. Time in the early 90s, Australia was Down a path of privatising infrastructure assets and working out how to procure government services jointly with the private sector became quite interested in, I guess what we might call private infrastructure.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This week's final summer series is a mega tufer. Raphael Arnt from Australia Future Fund and Jeffrey Rubin from CPPIB. We packaged these two leading sovereign wealth funds together to compare their application of the total portfolio approach with Australia focused on partnerships with external managers and CPPIB on a hybrid of internal and external management. Both have been thought leaders on modern portfolio management and have experienced great success with their innovative approaches.”
2025-09-01 · Capital Allocators · CIO Greatest Hits: Sovereign Wealth Funds – Raphael Arndt (Australia Future Fund) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source