“It’s very easy as a passive investor to say, ‘I’m in the passenger seat.’ We don’t take that view,” she says. “If we see performance trends that make us think things are slowing down, or you may be seeing the early signs of disruption, [we ask ourselves] do we want to get ahead of this? Do we want to go to market?… What tools do we have at our disposal? What influence can we put on the GP, or at least let them know we’re focused on it so that they’re focused on it?”

Still, Gubbels points out that AI isn’t purely a threat. “There’s equally going to be companies that are huge winners on the back of this. We need to also focus on where we have pockets of exposure to the disruptors and how [we can] make sure we’re getting sufficient capital invested behind those.”

Her team aims to do this by working with GP partners that have strong AI strategies. Since mid-2023, CPP Investments has backed tech-focused funds including Hg’s Hg Saturn 4, Thoma Bravo’s Thoma Bravo Fund XVI and Clearlake Capital’s Clearlake Capital Partners VIII. It also acted as an anchor investor in Accel-KKR’s debut GP-led secondaries fund, in which the pension invested alongside Ardian, StepStone and Adams Street Partners via a hybrid GP-led/primary fundraise.

Gubbels points out that its AI strategy is executed largely via CPPIB’s venture and growth programmes. “That’s an area [in which] we’re trying to get a lot smarter [to] make sure we’ve got the right level of exposure.”

Strategic secondaries

When PEI interviewed the secondaries team at CPP Investments in late 2018, the group was one of the larger investors in that segment of the market, with C$7.1 billion deployed that year (for context, market leader Ardian deployed $11.1 billion that same year).

Gubbels stresses that the pension’s approach to secondaries shouldn’t be evaluated by the dollars it invests; rather, that it uses secondaries as a strategic portfolio management tool. Its strategic sales of private equity exposure mean it’s able to tweak its PE portfolio to best take advantage of market dynamics, Gubbels says.

When evaluating whether to hold or sell, CPP Investments focuses less on discounts to net asset value – the main metric many sellers and buyers of second-hand fund interests live and die by – and more on go-forward returns. “If we’re generating low-single [or] double-digit returns… that’s fundamentally a drag,” she says. “We should take those dollars and reinvest them in new opportunities that can generate an 18-20 percent IRR.”

Indeed, the pension’s secondaries team acts as a kind of market intelligence hub for sales decisions. As a buyer in the market day in, day out, the pension has a good sense of where pricing is at, Gubbels adds. If the buyside team is bidding on and not winning portfolios because it hasn’t been competitive on price, that is the first leading indicator that the pension should be potentially considering a secondaries sale.

Such a situation would mean there is a “clear divergence in terms of our view on the go-forward return potential for these interests versus the market.” Capitalising on that arbitrage has been key, she adds.

While some have described institutional LPs who regularly tap the secondaries market as programmatic sellers, Gubbels says CPP Investments’ approach is by no means automated.

“It’s programmatic in that [in] every single portfolio review, we’re discussing whether or not this is a point in time where we want to access the market. But it’s not programmatic in that we [don’t] say, ‘Every December we [will] execute a portfolio sale.’ We are absolutely trying to time the market and capitalise on those opportunities where we think it is beneficial to be a seller versus being a buyer.”

The leadership of that team has since evolved. As of late 2025, only one member of the 2018 lineup’s leadership remains: Tom Kapsimalis, a managing director who was promoted to lead the pension’s secondaries business in October.

For CPPIB, secondaries sales are never reactive, Gubbels says. “I don’t want to be told what to sell,” she stresses. “For us, it’s a very intentional exercise to go through the portfolio to make sure we understand how many vintages we’re selling; what types of sector exposure, regional exposures; and making sure that we’re really designing these sales processes in a way that works for the portfolio we’re going to continue to hold, as opposed to just selling what may be actionable in the market that day.”

On buyside opportunities, the growth of the GP-led secondaries market and the rise of continuation vehicles has been the biggest evolution of the past decade – and yet, it is one that CPP Investments has had to approach with a “pretty fair amount of caution”. Today, Gubbels’ team does have conviction that where there is process integrity and where there are deal terms that make sense, CVs are a technology that play a “real role” in the private equity life cycle.

For large institutional investors, one somewhat controversial part of this development has been the rise of single-asset continuation vehicles – situations where sole companies are lifted out of existing funds into separate vehicles. Market sources have told PEI that the rise of SACVs is leading to less direct co-investment dealflow for investors.

Gubbels appears to approach this topic with pragmatism. While it is frustrating to see an increasing amount of exposure to assets being only accessible via a fund structure, swallowing this argument whole is akin to a head-in-the-sand argument, she points out.

“You can sit here and bang the table all day long [and argue] that it would have been better for us if this was in our direct business. Definitely, I would prefer to have access to these deals without economics. But if the deals no longer exist without economics, we also need to be commercial… If this market is going to continue to exist, how do we want to play in it?”

CPP Investments has begun investing selectively in SACVs – effectively creating a “synthetic fund” of these deals. Early performance has been strong, which suggests there is some structural advantage embedded in the selection process, the alignment or the assets themselves that are going into this channel, she notes.

Still, there is a whole future chapter to be written on CVs.

“We all need to figure out how CVs get to exit, and that is not particularly clear today,” she says. CPP Investments has a “prudent” allocation to its CV strategy for good reason, she points out.

“We want to see this market mature, and I think our partners themselves need to see [whether these were really] just a continuation of the status quo, or [whether there was] a genuine reason to put these into a continuation vehicle. That chapter needs to be written.”

The jury is out on some of the most pressing questions relating to CV exits, their performance and best practices, and Gubbels reckons it will take approximately 10 years for this story to fully play out. In the meantime, Canada’s most influential pension system isn’t exactly going to sit on the sidelines and have no exposure to one of the biggest growing trends in private equity.

“The early results are generating alpha for our programme, and that’s ultimately what we’re here to do.”