Ontario Teachers Is Getting Back to Old-School Private Equity

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan is refocusing part of its private investment team to return to its roots of operating companies to drive profit, according to a top investment executive.

“I think the question is, how do you generate returns out of private assets?” Gillian Brown, CIO for public and private investments, said in an interview Tuesday at the Bloomberg Canadian Finance Conference in New York. “For us that means refocusing on the operating-company-level results.”

The Toronto-based pension plan created a department last year to focus on value creation. The team, called Portfolio Solutions, is led by Kevin Kerr, ...