Jeff Wendling first began working with the Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan as a senior portfolio manager trading stocks 26 years ago, and took over as president and CEO in April of 2020.Supplied
Jeff Wendling, chief executive officer of the largest pension plan serving Ontario health care workers, will retire next year after five years leading the $113-billion fund.
Mr. Wendling, 64, will stay on until next year while Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan’s board of trustees chooses his successor, the company announced Wednesday.
He started at HOOPP as a senior portfolio manager trading stocks 26 years ago, and took over as president and CEO in April of 2020, in the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic that upended markets and ways of working. “It was a very strange time,” Mr. Wendling said in an interview, “and I think I was definitely able to provide a very steadying influence and supportive influence on the organization overall through a very challenging time.”
Before that, he was the pension fund’s chief investment officer, and also led its investments in public equities. HOOPP invests on behalf of about 460,000 employees at more than 670 employers in Ontario’s health care sector, including nurses and medical technicians.
As CEO, Mr. Wendling built up HOOPP’s investment team, adding staff in private equity, infrastructure and real estate and a deeper bench in its public equities division. He created a standalone risk division and hired HOOPP’s first chief risk officer, Saskia Goedhart. And he opened HOOPP’s first office outside of Canada, in London, which is intended to be a hub to help find better investments throughout Europe.
Part of Mr. Wendling’s legacy is also the role he played in developing a liability-driven investing (LDI) approach, a strategy that typically uses bonds and derivatives as a hedge to better match a pension fund’s assets and liabilities. That helps mitigate risks from interest rates and inflation, and he noted that “our funded ratio still remained strong. So LDI’s been very successful at limiting the volatility and the risk to our surplus.”
Throughout his time as CEO, HOOPP has had a funding surplus, which stood at 115 per cent as of Dec. 31 last year, meaning it has $1.15 for each dollar of pension benefits that it expects to owe to members.
Mr. Wendling presided over a tumultuous time in markets and HOOPP reported strong investment results through most of his tenure, including gains of 11.4 per cent in 2020 that allowed it to boost benefits to members, and 11.3 per cent in 2021. The fund lost 8.6 per cent in 2022, wiping out $9.8-billion, in a year when a number of major pension plans booked losses as stocks and bonds plunged in tandem after central banks raised interest rates rapidly to battle high inflation. But HOOPP bounced back last year, earning 9.4 per cent.
“I’m pleased with the performance,” he said, noting that the pension fund hasn’t raised contribution rates since 2004.
When he took over as CEO, Mr. Wendling set out to expand the international reach of HOOPP’s investment portfolio, adding greater exposure to fast-growing regions abroad. The pension fund now has about 21 per cent of its assets outside North America, mostly in Europe and Asia, but investments in Canada still account for 55 per cent of the portfolio – the highest ratio among its large Canadian peers.
“We have become more international. Geopolitical risks are probably greater than they appeared to be five years ago,” he said. “What does that mean for diversification and where you go in the world for returns?”
Mr. Wendling said a “comprehensive” search for a successor is under way that will look at internal and external candidates who could take over when he leaves next year.
“I think it’s time to have new leadership come in,” he said. “It just kind of felt like the right time.”