AsianInvestor today announces the second set of recipients of its fourth annual Institutional Excellence Awards, designed to recognise both best practice and improving standards among asset owners across Asia Pacific.

Today's set of awards reveal the winning organisations by proficiency type. Recipients in this category are recognised for excellence in specific areas of skill and process. Differences in institutional set-up and objectives can vary widely even within these narrow categories, and measuring progress can take a matter of months, a year, or several years.
 
Innovation 
New Zealand Super Fund 
 
Governance
Bank Indonesia
 
Investment Capabilities
Employees' Provident Fund (EPF), Malaysia
 
Environmental, Social and Governance capabilities 
Government Pension Investment Fund (GPIF) 
 
Individual Contribution to Institutional Investment
To be announced on the night of the awards dinner 
 
We will conclude our Institutional Excellence Awards by naming the outstanding asset owners by geography tomorrow. Please see here for our winning asset owners by institutional category yesterday (Wednesday). 

To decide on the recipients of these awards, our editorial team requested direct input from an array of leading asset owners across the region. We then canvassed senior executives at fund management firms, consultancies, banks and other service providers for their expertise, to generate a shortlist of asset owners deserving of recognition. We then, where necessary, requested additional information from short-listed institutions, before making our final decisions. 
 
AsianInvestor would like to thank the many people throughout the region who helped us for their time and candour.

Asia Pacific is a region with highly diverse asset owners of varying sophistication, capabilities and objectives. These awards are not designed to merely to choose the most advanced investors in each institutional investor class, but to recognise asset owners that continue to push themselves to improve, or to maintain a standard of market excellence over long periods of time. 
 
In some cases the awards recognise asset owners that have made incremental improvements. In other cases they are meant to highlight trailblazing organisations at a regional or global level. Our focus particularly emphasised fund governance, the internal capabilities of the asset owner, and its ability to adapt to long-term changes in market return expectations. 

All award recipients will be invited to attend our Institutional Excellence Awards black-tie dinner on Wednesday, December 6 at the Ritz Carlton Millenia in Singapore. This will run in conjunction with the 9th Southeast Asia Institutional Investor Forum at the same venue.

Complete write-ups explaining our decisions and profiling these institutions will appear online in the coming weeks, and will be presented in the December/January print edition of AsianInvestor.

For details on attending our Institutional Excellence Awards dinner, please contact AsianInvestor's commercial director, Terry Rayner, at terry.rayner@haymarket.asia or +852 3175 1963.

For more information about the Southeast Asia Institutional Investment Forum, please contact AsianInvestor's senior conference producer, Minal Khilani, at minal.khilani@haymarket.asia or +65 6579 0103.