Our focus on innovation and research

Our Innovation & Research department focuses on developing new products, services and optimizing processes for our customers and the participants of pension funds. The guidelines used are closely tied to the needs of our customers and the strategic goals of PGGM Investments. One of these goals, aims at realizing greater returns against smaller risks within the various financial markets.

The key driver of these innovations is enabling the organization to accelerate innovations based on automatically created cloud environments where investment departments can benefit from cloud, infrastructure, computation power as well as traceability, transparency and maintainability. Over the previous years, innovation has provided input to accelerate processes using cloud infrastructure. Innovation also supported the PGGM Investments Azure cloud service team in creating automated templates which enables departments to create analytics platforms within the cloud. This knowledge is being combined with the knowledge of tech partners to add sandbox environments (experimentation environments where productional data can be used) to these platforms.

Listed Real Estate (LRE) Team Private Real Estate (PRE) Team Infrastructure Team Currency trading desk

The first department to have access to such a platform is listed real estate (LRE). This platform consists of a complete infrastructure and algorithms to run LRE portfolios. The traditional approach is replaced using modern artificial intelligence (AI) applications using real time, up to date data available in the market. In 2022, machine learning applications will be introduced on our activities which will enable LRE to gather even more insights in short amounts of time.

Another front office team, the PRE team, decided to specifically focus on alternative data in order to improve their results. The goal is to create value from alternative data such as availability regarding parking lots around real estate. There are a lot of new hypotheses which are tested using new technology and alternative data. These could potentially result in new indicators in order to value real estate. PRE is researching these correlations in close collaboration with the innovation department. The end goal is to determine if alternative data can be quantified, incorporated and adds value to existing valuation models.

Starting 2021, a new cloud platform is being built for the infrastructure team. Using this platform, the infrastructure team, together with the innovations team, can develop algorithms finding new opportunities based on market data. The goal is to spot deals before other investment parties do, to create a competitive advantage.

In November 2021, a new collaboration between PGGM Investments & MN kicked off. A joint coding environment was created which includes a database to create an algorithm based on information from the currency market. The PGGM Investments and MN trading desk collaboration contributes to creating an algorithm to improve currency trading when markets are volatile. PGGM Investments and MN also set up a collaboration with universities which brings in bright students to work on this initiative.