After a Two-Year Search, CalPERS Finally Hires Private Equity Head

The California Public Employee Retirement System (CalPERS) concluded a two-year search at its Monday board meeting when Chief Investment Officer Ben Meng announced it had hired Greg Ruiz to lead the $360 billion pension organization’s private equity division.

Ruiz, a private equity lifer, previously worked at Palo Alto-based Altamont Capital Partners. He started at Goldman Sachs, later moving to FFL Partners. He is a principal at Altamont, specializing in consumer, business services, and tech investments.

Ruiz’s hiring is to replace Real Desrochers, who left the fund in 2017 to join Chinese bank CITIC. Sarah Corr had been filling the role in the interim since Desrochers’ departure.

Ruiz joins as CIO Meng is looking to accelerate the fund’s direct investment strategy for its private equity business. The pension plan wants to bring more staff in-house and harness more assets while cutting back on manager fees (it paid more than $700 million in fiscal 2018). At its March board meeting, the fund approved plans to create two private equity organizations, Innovation and Horizon, in which it would invest up to $20 billion.

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Private equity is the fund’s best-performing portfolio, having returned 10.5% annually over the past 20 years. It currently makes up 7.6% of the fund’s assets, but Meng wants more, especially since it has shrunk from 2013, when the PE portfolio was about 12% of CalPERS’s assets.

Meng said Ruiz has a “keen understanding” of what successful private equity demands are. But there’s another affinity he has with CalPERS, other than his investment background.

He has family in the pension system.

At the plan’s Monday investment meeting, Meng said this fun fact further incentivizes Ruiz as “his commitment to our mission is already very strong.”

Meng added that coming to CalPERS is “just like coming home” for Ruiz, who the CIO said grew up “just down the street” in Davis.

Meng also praised Corr for her work as interim head.

“Her leadership and skills have been essential to the success [of the] asset class and I cannot thank her [enough] for all she has done,” he said.

Ruiz will start sometime in the summer. He was unable to be reached for comment.

CDPQ in March increased its 2020 low-carbon allocation target to C$32 billion from C$26 billion worth of assets under management. The fund wants to cut its carbon footprint by 25% per dollar invested by 2025.

“Climate Change is an immediate challenge that is already impacting businesses, as well as a long-term trend that changes the balance between risks and opportunities in many sectors,” Jérôme Marquis’s, a CDPQ managing director of fixed income, told CIO. “It is part of our job to look carefully at the opportunities that generates the transition to a low carbon economy. This investment reflects our capacity to capture these opportunities that are also well aligned with our overall investment strategy as a long-term investor.”

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Lightsource has more than 2 gigawatts of solar power projects under management. It hopes to bring that number to 10 gigawatts by 2024.

CDPQ’s asset mix is divided across three portfolios: equities (48%), fixed income (30.4%), and real assets (19.7%).

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Tags: CDPQ, ESG, Lightsource BP, Pension, Solar Energy

After a Two-Year Search, CalPERS Finally Hires Private Equity Head

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