On behalf of Vestcor employees and our senior management team, I am pleased to report that even with the ongoing challenges of the global COVID-19 pandemic in 2021 we had a very successful year. Vestcor continued to provide solid long-term investment management performance and administration service results on behalf of our clients during a period of heightened global financial markets volatility, increased administration transaction processing volumes, and intensified member inquiries and service requests. We were also pleased to welcome two new shared risk pension plans to our investment management platform during the year. We now provide services to 10 investment clients, 11 pension plans, and 4 employee benefit plans. These clients now represent over $21 billion of financial assets, and over 106,000 plan members. The Vestcor team made good progress against most of our 2021 annual business plan objectives in this challenging environment. Longterm client investment returns and risk levels remained well ahead of their respective targets, and our Pension and Benefits Administration Teams finalized the implementation of our new pension administration system which experienced a number of COVID related challenges and stakeholder complications during its’ initial deployment last year. In fact, our most recent quarterly administration based Key Performance Indicators have returned to meet client targets and we expect to continue to improve this progress further in the new year. Vestcor continues to also provide very cost-effective services to our clients versus other third-party alternatives. Administration based client expenses remained well within annual client budgets while investment expenses were slightly higher only due to variable incentive expenses associated with our achievement of record value-added investment performance over client benchmarks. These additional investment expenses resulted in a significant contribution to 2021 client returns as detailed later in this Annual Report. OUR CORPORATE PURPOSE: A PARTNER IN CREATING AND DELIVERING SUSTAINABLE FINANCIAL SECURITY. As part of the strategic focus of our management team, employees, and Board of Directors, we established the above noted corporate purpose statement during the year to encapsulate what we aim to accomplish on behalf of our clients and to act as a filter for our business planning process and daily operational decisions. The statement also encompasses our long-term focus on building sustainable pools of investment capital for our clients through our not-for-profit partnership model. In order to confirm our Vestcor value proposition, and help substantiate our new corporate purpose statement, we conducted Vestcor’s second biennial Client Satisfaction Survey during the year. We were pleased to see that the overall satisfaction rate of our clients remains high at 79% and we also welcomed a few related comments and suggestions that we will follow-up on to continue to improve our service offerings. It also continues to be very encouraging to see that the specific member feedback we received throughout the year from our ongoing member services surveys remain strong and further confirms the value we bring to our client’s plan members.
COMMUNICATIONS FOCUS Communication strategy has remained extremely important during the COVID pandemic. Our Communications Team continues to do an outstanding job by both assisting Vestcor Management in providing frequent operational updates and progress reports with our client Trustees, while at the same time assisting the Trustees to continue to keep their membership well informed. Vestcor provided client Trustees with frequent financial markets updates from each of our Investment Teams throughout the year along with the development of a focused series of informative webinars on topics such as: Vestcor’s responsible investment program, investment performance measurement and the Global Investment Performance Standards (GIPS®), investment policy benchmarks, and a cybersecurity update. Other notable communication achievements conducted during the year included; i) our key role in assisting the NBPSPP and NBTPP conduct their member based Annual Information Meetings which are an important part in communicating Vestcor’s long-term success in meeting the objectives of each of our respective shareholder pension plans, and ii) our September appearance before the Standing Committee on Public Accounts of the Legislative Assembly based on their invitation to provide an update on Vestcor’s activities during 2019 and 2020, and to address questions with respect to the observations made in last year’s Auditor General’s 2020 Volume II Report. Our website vestcor.org acts as an important resource for our client pension and employee benefit plans.
VESTCOR ANNUAL REPORT 2021
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REPORT FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CEO
REPORT FROM THE PRESIDENT AND CEO
