VIDEO: CPPIB's Mark Machin

"It is not an easy thing to do, I wouldn't recommend it for most organizations," he says. "It's only once you have got to a certain number of people and scale and commitment to the region that it is worthwhile."

There are various challenges, not least working late into the night or early in the morning in order to communicate with colleagues in head office. Career development for local hires or investment professionals transferred to the Asia office from North America is another issue.

"Where are they going to go next in their career? Can that office grow enough for them to have a career opportunity in the region?" Machin says. "And if they come back to the main office do they have real opportunities or have they missed out on opportunities they could have seen in the main office."

As of March 2015, CPPIB had $264.6 billion in assets, of which $50.6 billion was deployed in private equity, $30.3 billion in real estate, $15.2 billion in infrastructure, $7.6 billion in private debt and $3.8 billion in private real estate debt. The pension plan likes to invest at least $75 million per fund and can back emerging markets funds of at least $500 million in size, rising to $750 million in developed markets.

This means certain GPs are unable to qualify for investment but Machin believes these thresholds reflect a fair balance. "If we start going after too many small opportunities, the cost of managing the relationship with the fund manager starts stacking up. It doesn't make sense for us," he says. "While we might miss the occasional emerging manager that is just not big enough we have to weigh that up against the cost of a very inefficient program."

However, co-investment is one area in which CPPIB has begun to compromise in Asia, abandoning strict guidelines of only participating in very large deals and being involved from the very beginning of the investment process.

"We have become more flexible in being able to do smaller check sizes if needed as well as very large ones," Machin says. "We can go from $35 million to multiple billions of dollars. We can also be flexible on what stage we get involved in the process."

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