PSP prepares to be ‘capital solutions provider’ for large global corporates

The first-ever Canada Investment Summit was held in Toronto in September, at a time when Canada’s big ‘Maple 8’ pension funds – including Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments) – are being called on to invest more domestically. Addressing the summit, Deborah K Orida, president and CEO of PSP Investments, said she expected the investor to increase its investments in Canada by 30-40% to more than C$100bn (€63bn) over the next few years. But there is the potential to overemphasise a narrative that Canadian pension funds are about to retrench to their domestic market.

“The question is not necessarily, ‘Do we want to invest more in Europe, do we want to invest more in the Americas?’ We react to what’s happening all across the globe”

PSP Investments’ C$32bn infrastructure portfolio is globally diversified with approximately 45% in the Americas, about 35% in Europe and 20% in Asia-Pacific. “The portfolio is well diversified across sectors and geographies,” says Sandiren Curthan, managing director of infrastructure investments. “For me, the most important point is that there’s plenty of capital for us to deploy across sectors and geographies. The question is not necessarily, ‘Do we want to invest more in Europe, do we want to invest more in the Americas?’ We react to what’s happening all across the globe.”

Curthan has been with PSP Investments for 15 years and was previously global head of infrastructure, before relocating back to London for personal reasons, handing over his remit to Andrew Alley. One of his current areas of focus is to “position PSP as a capital solutions provider for large corporates globally”.

As Curthan is quick to add: “The beauty is that we have capital to deploy”. This has been helped by the strong performance of infrastructure, which has generated returns of 10.1% during the fiscal year that ended 31 March 2026, and 15% and 12.7% over five and 10 years, respectively. 

Based at the firm’s offices in London’s Victoria, Curthan is on a mission to get the PSP name out to corporates as one synonymous with reliable, long-term but also flexible capital for infrastructure. PSP Investments can invest across the capital stack, including majority and minority equity positions, junior and senior debt, and structured equity.

This flexible approach is partly behind PSP Investments’ performance in the asset class, Curthan says. PSP Investments outperformed its five and 10-year benchmarks of 14.4% and 9.2%, respectively.

Four distinguishing factors

The Canadian Maple 8 are often talked about as though they were a homogeneous group, Curthan suggests. “We usually try to paint the Canadian pension funds with the same brush, right? But I do think that we’re different. In my view, there are four aspects why we’re different, and that’s the reason that explains our performance versus the broader market.”

In addition to the flexible approach, another differentiator is the strategy of building out global exposure through platforms. “We buy a business that has a management team that can develop, construct and operate assets in sectors with strong tailwinds across one or several geographies,” he says. “That is a core part of the strategy. The idea for us is to leverage the expertise of these businesses that are usually controlled or co-controlled by PSP to develop new assets or optimise our existing assets. So I think that’s a key differentiator.”

He points to AviAlliance as an example, which holds stakes in airports in Germany, Greece, the UK and Puerto Rico. “With that platform, we go out and try to buy new assets,” Curthan says. “We’ve got this in the airport space, we’ve got this in the road space, we’ve got this in the renewables space. We used to have it in data centres, which we sold and made quite a lot of money.”

Together with Macquarie Asset Management, PSP Investments acquired a majority stake in data-centre platform AirTrunk in 2020 – which at the time was valued at more than A$3bn (€1.85bn) – before selling the interest in 2024 to a Blackstone-led consortium including Canada Pension Plan Investment Board in a A$24bn transaction.

This leads on to another differentiator. “We’re constantly evaluating whether it is the right time to sell our assets, despite the fact that if we want to, we can hold the assets indefinitely,” says Curthan. “It’s a good exercise because we have the foresight to crystallise value in some of our assets, which has contributed to our outstanding performance.”

And the fourth? “We have a culture within the team of innovation. So if you look at our history, we invested in rolling stock in the late 2000s when people didn’t necessarily think it was core infrastructure,” he notes. “We started the strategy of platforms in the early 2010s. We were among the first investors in data centres back in 2017. In 2020, we created a new portfolio, high-inflation-correlated infrastructure, when inflation was quite low. And in the early 2020s we actually invested in secondaries as well, when the market was quite small.”