By Christine Giordano
Brett Chatfield is leaving his CIO role at Cbus Super Fund in Melbourne to take a new CIO role at a yet un-named family office.
“After 12 and a half fantastic years at Cbus, I have decided to take up a new role as the CIO of a large private family office,” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn announcement. He noted that during his tenure, Cbus benefitted from exponential growth, growing from $22 billion to more than $100 billion “and over the 10 and 15 years to 31 March 2025 our default Growth Option was in the top 5 best performing funds in the Superratings industry survey. The investment fee has also substantially declined since the internalization model was introduced in 2016.”
He noted being mentored by CEO, Kristian Fok, “who has been a great mentor, and has done an exceptional job as CEO,” and acknowledged the “fantastic” investment team (Leigh Gavin, Linda Cunningham, Justin Pascoe, Jordan Kraiten, Myooran Mahalingam, and Ros Mackay) and supportive investment board.
Lastly, he noted, “Cbus is incredibly well placed to continue to deliver great results for members, and under Leigh Gavin’s leadership will go from strength to strength.”
Gavin, who had been promoted to the deputy CIO role in February, has been at the fund one year and eight months as head of portfolio solutions. He was the former CIO of LUCRF Super from 2016-2021.
Said Chatfield at the time of Gavin’s promotion in a press release, “I am very pleased to announce the appointment of Leigh Gavin to the role of Deputy CIO. Leigh has been an integral part of the Investment Leadership Team since 2023, and brings a strong depth of senior experience including at CIO and senior investment advisory levels. In addition to his impressive experience, Gavin’s strong knowledge of the Fund and connection to investing for our members dates back to the early 2000s as an advisor.
“Leigh has done an exceptional job continuing the build out of internal equity strategies, and enhanced key strategic portfolio initiatives and business management activities. We are very well placed to continue the successful build out of our internal capabilities under Leigh. We are forecasting that our internal investment capabilities will grow to about 50% of the portfolio within three years. Leigh will continue to look at ways we can bring further strategies in-house as part of Cbus’ five-year investment strategy.”
Gavin has referred to the fund as entering a ‘Goldilocks period,’ where it is “small enough to take advantage of a range of opportunities and large enough to be achieving real economies of scale for members.”
