MSCI Canadian Institutional Investor Forum

Montreal

8:00 a.m. ・ Registration & Networking Breakfast

8:30 a.m. ・ Welcome and introduction

8:45 a.m. ・ Keynote

9:10 a.m. ・ Positioning for a Shifting World: Navigating AI, Geopolitics and the New Investment Paradigm

Institutional investors are contending with three converging forces — the rapid build-out of AI infrastructure, a more fragmented geopolitical order and mounting pressure on energy security and physical resilience. Each is reshaping portfolios in its own right: AI is redefining competitive advantage and exposure across sectors, geopolitical realignment is changing the calculus around trade, supply chains and capital flows and energy security concerns are elevating physical risk as a core underwriting consideration.

This session brings together senior investment leaders to address how these forces are shaping portfolio positioning. It will offer a grounded view of how leading institutions are adapting to an environment in which AI, geopolitics and energy security can no longer be considered in isolation.

10:00 a.m. ・ Networking Break

10:30 a.m. ・Repricing Risk in Private Markets: How Canadian Allocators See Risk and Opportunity Clearly

For Canada's largest allocators, private markets are a growing share of the portfolio, weighted toward infrastructure and real assets. As that allocation grows, so does the difficulty of measuring what it holds: a single infrastructure fund can span data centers, toll roads and renewables, and limited look-through makes concentration and correlation hard to pin down.

How do you build a taxonomy that holds across assets this different? As physical climate risk becomes a driver of value, how do you price flood, wildfire and heat into assets built to last 30 years or more? And in private credit, the fastest-growing and least-disclosed corner of the market, how confident are you that you chose the risk you hold rather than inherited it?

Drawing on MSCI research, this session brings investment leaders together to discuss where risk and opportunity sit in private markets, what greater transparency changes about the decisions that follow and why these questions carry particular weight for Canadian portfolios.

11:20 a.m. ・ Public Markets, Reimagined: Finding Alpha in a Changing Landscape 

Global public equity markets are undergoing structural change, and the forces are compounding: concentration at generational highs as a narrow cohort of mega-caps carries more of the benchmark, a heavy IPO calendar reshaping the index and AI reordering which businesses lead.

This panel brings asset owners together with MSCI specialists to examine where alpha is emerging as that landscape resets, from gauging concentration and breadth, to what the IPO wave means for positioning, to how risk models hold up when a handful of names drive the benchmark.

AI runs throughout on two dimensions: as an investment theme, where the problem is measuring genuine exposure across the value chain, and as a tool for sharpening portfolio construction and the signals allocators draw on for alpha. Running underneath both is a question about factor investing itself, as traditional style and sector definitions no longer capture where the real exposures sit.

12:10 p.m. ・ Lunch

1:10 p.m. ・ From Frameworks to Decisions: Total Portfolio Thinking in the Real World

As public and private markets converge, the hardest questions in total portfolio thinking sit at the analytical level. How do you compare public and private assets in common terms? How much risk does a private commitment really carry? And how do you judge a new opportunity by its contribution to the whole portfolio rather than its standalone return? This session brings together asset owners who are putting these tools to work, sharing how they use cross-asset factor models and other analytical tools to sharpen total portfolio decisions.

Panelists and MSCI experts will discuss what these analytics reveal that asset-class silos miss, where the tools still fall short, and how funds at different stages are turning total portfolio thinking into everyday investment decisions. 

2:00 p.m. ・ The AI Imperative: Reinventing the Investment Organization

AI has the potential to be one of the most consequential innovations for the investment industry, reshaping how organizations work and what their teams are capable of. For asset owners facing growing demands on lean teams, applied well, AI can be a powerful force multiplier, unlocking individual productivity and expanding organizational capabilities. But turning that potential into results is extremely challenging, and for many firms, the impact is still emerging.

At MSCI, our ambition is to harness that potential to help transform how investing gets done. This panel brings together leaders from across the investment community for a candid, solution-focused conversation about what that means in practice. We’ll get specific about where AI is already creating value: codifying institutional knowledge rather than outsourcing it, sharpening decisions with richer data — especially the unstructured data most teams still leave on the table — and maintaining the security, trust and auditability that investment decisions demand.

Panelists won’t just talk about what worked. They’ll be honest about what didn’t, what they have learned and what it really takes to lead change at this scale.

2:50 p.m. ・ Networking Break

3:10 p.m. ・ Chief Risk Officer Insights: The Risk Leader as Strategist 

For Canada’s largest investors, the hardest risks are no longer the ones that show up cleanly in a report. A portfolio can look well diversified and still carry a large, undiagnosed bet on a few economies, one currency or a handful of sectors. The traditional stock-bond hedge is less dependable, private assets are harder to value and exit quickly and shocks from AI to geopolitics can unfold faster than models trained on the past can anticipate. The chief risk officer’s role is increasingly to identify these exposures and help the investment teams act on them before they show up in returns.

Drawing together the day’s themes, from AI and geopolitics to the repricing of public and private markets, this closing panel examines how chief risk officers are evolving from risk managers into strategic advisors. Panelists will discuss how scenario analysis and a total portfolio lens can help their organizations distinguish the risks they intend to take from those inherited by default, and translate that understanding into better investment decisions.

4:00 p.m. ・ Closing Remarks