The women expanding Fidelity’s institutional capabilities
Investment decisions for institutional investors sit across many layers, from investment design, plan structure, and a portfolio manager’s thesis to communication. Questions tend to be practical, and the answers shape how asset managers are evaluated − not just on strategy but on whether they understand how the prospective investor operates as a whole.
At Fidelity, that perspective is built into how the Fidelity Canada’s institutional sales and consultant relations groups are structured. Tracey Wong, the newly minted vice president, sales and service, has spent 27 years building Fidelity’s institutional relationships and is making sure the firm stays connected to what the market actually needs. She championed the creation of a dedicated consultant relations team and has been responsible for the addition of personnel with expertise in defined contribution and private markets at Fidelity Canada Institutional.
Stéphanie Mariamo, vice president, institutional business development, who joined Fidelity Canada Institutional in 2024, draws on an actuarial and consulting background to change the conversation around target date funds and defined contribution outcomes. Charissa Lai, director, institutional private markets, who joined Fidelity Canada Institutional’s consultant relations team, brings private markets experience from Canada’s largest pension allocators.
Fidelity’s proprietary research − a magnet for top-tier talent
Fidelity is family and employee owned, has 500-plus research analysts1 around the world providing real-time fundamental insight, a long-term investment philosophy that rewards returns over asset gathering, and a strategic commitment to the areas where Canadian institutional investors are headed, from private markets to target-date strategies and beyond. On public equities, Wong sees a convergence forming between fundamental and quantitative approaches. Fidelity has taken a first step by combining its legacy fundamental team, a substantial quantitative team, and technology. “I think that’s really where long-only public equities is going to shift to,” she says. “ Some plans have moved to pure quant. I think there is a home for a quant and fundamental approach together, bolted together with technology.”
The depth of continuous research available at Fidelity and how it drives portfolio construction is what brought both Mariamo and Lai to the firm.
“One of our portfolio managers always says, every day, if we’re not changing something, we are reaffirming where we stand. It’s not a one-time effort that we do at one moment in the year, put aside, and get back to the next year. It’s constant,” says Mariamo.
Rather than building for a stereotypical average Canadian, the global asset-allocation team responsible for Fidelity’s target-date strategy studies a distribution of individuals to understand the full population and design a solution that serves that range.
Tracey Wong, vice president, sales and service
Tracey Wong joined Fidelity when the firm’s institutional business was, by her own account, barely known. That was precisely the appeal: “Building something that was less known to be the institutional business is always great to me. That’s what I really thrive on.”
She leads the sales and service teams for Fidelity Canada Institutional, overseeing relationships with large and small pension plans, consultants, outsourced CIO providers, and other institutional clients. Her oversight includes teams that execute the presentation of these strategies within the public domain to ensure that our capabilities are presented consistently and accurately to the market. To ensure that Fidelity’s institutional capabilities are presented accurately and consistently to the market, a team of analysts responsible for RFPs and database functions also reports to Wong.
What makes her stay at Fidelity is the same thing that brought her in: the constant evolution. The market was much smaller three decades ago, and what Fidelity now defines as seven distinct segments of the institutional market didn’t exist in its current form. “The ever-evolving nature of the business and being relevant to the market − that’s what keeps me here.”
Building the consultant relations function was driven by a straightforward observation. Consultants are central to how institutional investment decisions get made, yet Fidelity had no one dedicated to engaging them. “When I took a step back and looked at the institutional market back then, we only had sales and relationship management,” Wong says. “Consultants are such a big part of the decision-making. Why do we not have someone cater to servicing that part of the market?” The function she built connects market intelligence with internal strategy, and Fidelity’s consultant relations team is, by her account, the largest and deepest on the street.
Coverage extends beyond traditional investment consultants. “The actuaries have the longest view of what these plans are doing and what they intend to do over time,” Wong says. “As we have more conversations with these actuaries and all levels through the consulting firm, we understand where these plans are headed for the future.”
The consulting landscape itself is shifting. The largest firms have moved into delegated investment platforms, creating both a competitive challenge and a partnership opportunity. Fidelity’s response has been to pursue placement on those delegated platforms while continuing to deepen direct consultant engagement. “We do need to continue to partner with them,” Wong says. “And so we will, but we will also partner with them for their delegated business. Getting Fidelity capabilities onto their platform is how we continue to partner.” On what the market is focused on, Wong also identifies two dominant themes. She points to solutions for the defined contribution/CAP markets through target-date strategies, citing a need to move beyond a surface comparison. Wong’s message to plan sponsors is pointed: with members largely disengaged from investment decisions, the fiduciary question becomes acute.
“Do you not want your employees to not outlive their savings?” she asks. “Work the math backwards. Then ask how the shape of your glide path needs to look to achieve that.”
The industry, she argues, treats target-date funds as interchangeable when they are not. “There are 50 shades of grey out there. We’re solving for the same problem, but we’re getting to it very differently.”
The second is alternatives. Allocations have grown from around 3 percent to as high as 45 percent in some plans, spanning DB plans, endowments, foundations, and multi-employer plans. As public equities and fixed income become more correlated, plans have a need to diversify their risk and to continue to find ways to enhance their return.
However, even within the alternative asset class, there continues to be an evolution of choice. Canadian institutions entered through real estate and infrastructure, but the frontier is expanding into private credit, NAV financing solutions, and beyond. “Fidelity’s capabilities are so deep that these solutions were a natural evolution. It has enabled us to continue to be relevant to Canadian plans,” she says.
Looking ahead, Wong expects the number of asset managers a typical plan sponsor works with to contract significantly, from 12 to 15 down to perhaps five to seven. In that environment, what will differentiate a winning manager is not a single solution but a genuine understanding of the plan sponsor’s needs. “Partnerships will become more and more important,” she says. “I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s five to seven over time.”
Stéphanie Mariamo, vice president, institutional business development Stéphanie Mariamo came from the actuarial side, and she thinks that changes everything. Her career started in defined benefit actuarial work before shifting to DC/capital accumulation plans, where her focus expanded beyond investment mechanics to financial wellness, member education, and the practical question of whether people will actually be able to retire.
Years of consulting gave her a front-row seat to how plan sponsors think, how committees make decisions, and where the tensions lie between simplicity, cost, and governance. “Pension funds are not the only thing they look after,” she notes, reflecting on the competing priorities that shape how plans are structured and managed.
What drew her to Fidelity was conviction − both in the firm’s long-standing commitment to the defined contribution space and in the rigour behind its target-date-fund offering. “I have high conviction in the glide path, in the depth of the research and resources, and in the discipline of the portfolio construction,” she says. “That level of conviction matters, and it carries real weight.”
Spotlight
“We really look at a distribution of different Canadians so we can properly understand the population and build a solution that will meet the needs of that distribution, as opposed to sort of a stereotypical average Canadian individual,” says Mariamo.
Fidelity’s global research analysts make the firm a top 10 investor in most large public companies and one of the largest pre-IPO buyers worldwide, giving private markets teams unparalleled management access and insights that no external expert network can replicate. On any given day, up to 50 C-suite executives visit Fidelity’s Boston offices, and those meetings are open to every investment team. “Our partners, our clients, the private equity sponsors, they value these insights,” Lai says. “It makes us very appealing in the sense that we provide a different complexion on the underwriting process.”
Lai gives a concrete example. “A private credit investor can ask a healthcare equity research analyst what the impact is of the latest regulatory change in outsourced physician services, and what is the impact on insurance providers. That allows the private credit team to make more informed decisions on consolidation in that space.”
Fidelity Canada Institutional serves a diversified client base across all major asset classes, focusing on corporate and public defined benefit and defined contribution pension plans, endowments and foundations, insurance companies, MEPPs, and financial institutions. Built on over 50 years of serving the needs of institutional investors worldwide, we offer active and risk-controlled disciplines, including Canadian, US, international, and global equity, fixed-income, asset allocation, real estate, and custom solutions.
Company Profile
10
YEARS IN BUSINESS
3
NUMBER OF AUCKLAND OFFICES
13
LANGUAGES SPOKEN
60+
NUMBER OF STAFF
2
DOYLES RECOMMENDED FAMILY LAWYERS
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Company Profile
“When I took a step back and looked at the institutional market back then, we only had sales and relationship management. Consultants are such a big part of the decision-making. Why do we not have someone servicing that part of the market?”
Tracey Wong, Fidelity
“Is the real risk a market downturn at the moment an employee retires? Or is it the far greater risk of outliving their savings altogether?”
Stéphanie Mariamo, Fidelity
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Published June 29, 2026
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Find out more
Stéphanie Mariamo
Tracey Wong
Charissa Lai
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Fidelity’s institutional sales and consultant relations teams connect portfolio construction to governance, communication, and member outcomes
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
“I’ve chosen to allocate personal capital to private markets − including private equity secondaries, primary commitments, and direct investments. It reflects the investment approach I saw consistently rewarded in institutional settings”
Charissa Lai, Fidelity
Fidelity Canada Institutional
Charissa Lai, director, institutional private markets Charissa Lai’s career has followed a consistent logic: go where the growth is. It took her from investment banking at Morgan Stanley in South Africa and the UK to the heart of Canada’s pension system, first at Canada Pension Plan (CPP) Investments, then at IMCO, and now at Fidelity.
At CPP Investments, she arrived during what she calls the “golden age” of the Canadian pensions. The plans were flush with capital and recognized globally as pioneers in private markets investing. Lai focused on portfolio construction, fund manager selection, co-investments, and secondaries investing. She contributed to one- and five-year strategy planning and supported recommendations that helped grow the private equity portfolio from roughly $40 billion to $70 billion over six years.
Those years informed a personal conviction in the asset class. “I’ve chosen to allocate personal capital to private markets − including private equity secondaries, primary commitments, and direct investments,” Lai says. “It reflects the investment approach I saw consistently rewarded in institutional settings.”
She moved to IMCO for a similar reason: the chance to build out a growing alternatives program. And when Fidelity came calling, the logic held again. “It was the opportunity to build from the ground up. How often do you get an entrepreneurial role within a $7 trillion platform?”
Her mandate is to evaluate Fidelity’s global private markets strategies and determine what fits the Canadian institutional market. Fidelity’s Canadian presence has been built on public markets, but the firm has deep private markets capabilities globally that have begun to be brought here. “I’ve had the privilege of learning alternatives at the best institutions that there are globally,” she reflects. “Bringing that to the market through Fidelity is very exciting.”
The case for why Fidelity is the right platform to do this, she argues, rests on two pillars: research depth and long-term alignment. For the latter, teams can go smaller and more selective even as invested capital grows. The direct-lending team, for example, has doubled its capital while targeting lower mid-market companies with an average EBITDA of $17 million, exactly the space many competitors have abandoned as they moved upmarket to deploy larger funds.
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Fidelity is founded
1946
Started managing large pension plan assets
1964
Started managing asset-allocation strategies
1986
Canadian office established
1987
First target-date solution launched
1996
Milestones
On why alternatives matter to Canadian institutional portfolios, Lai is direct. Traditional equity-bond diversification has become less reliable as correlations between the two have risen. Private markets introduce different exposures that drive different sources of return. When you model private asset classes alongside public markets and optimize, “you see how alternatives contribute to reducing risk and enhancing total portfolio risk-adjusted returns.” The investable universe reinforces the case: there are roughly 9,000 public companies globally today versus over 200,000 private equity-backed companies, and the number of public companies has fallen by about 50 percent since the late 1990s.
“Companies don’t necessarily see the appeal of going public these days,” Lai observes. “You do see that in the numbers.”
Among the strategies she is most focused on, direct lending stands out. She points to a Canadian pension plan that co-invested alongside Fidelity after finding that its existing direct-lending managers had all migrated upmarket and stopped offering co-investment opportunities. “They started asking themselves: where did direct lending originally start? Well, it started in the lower mid-market.”
Beyond direct lending, she is focused on real estate debt, where portfolio managers came to Fidelity specifically because compensation is tied to returns rather than asset gathering, and a convertible arbitrage strategy with a three-times Sharpe ratio and top-decile performance. “It’s a market-neutral, uncorrelated strategy,” Lai says, “which is exactly what the market needs right now.”
What ties it together The Canadian institutional market is not short on product, and it is expanding its team of people who understand the full context in which investment decisions get made: the governance constraints, the regulatory environment, the member demographics, the evolving relationship between plan sponsors and their consultants. What Tracey Wong, Stéphanie Mariamo, and Charissa Lai each bring to their conversations with investors is not just knowledge of Fidelity’s capabilities but a working understanding of the problems that Fidelity’s strategies are posed to solve.
Wong has spent over two decades making sure Fidelity’s institutional business stays calibrated to where the market is actually going, not where it was last year. Mariamo knows what keeps a plan sponsor committee up at night on the DC side because she spent years advising them as a consultant. And Lai knows what it looks like to build an alternatives program from the inside of a pension plan, because she did it.
For an industry that talks a lot about partnership, this is what it looks like in practice: people with real expertise, doing specific work, inside a firm with the global resources to back them up.
1 As of March 31, 2026
Charissa Lai
Director, institutional private markets
Stéphanie Mariamo
Vice president, institutional business development
Tracey Wong
Vice president, sales and service
25+
YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
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YEARS OF EXPERIENCE
Fidelity was first to launch target-date funds in Canada and has decades of experience building, refining, and evolving them to meet the needs of Canadian plan sponsors and members.
Mariamo’s consulting background shapes how she engages with plan sponsors. Where a typical asset-management conversation might focus narrowly on fund performance, Mariamo brings a broader, more strategic lens − one that incorporates legislation, CAPSA guidelines, plan design, member engagement, and how Fidelity’s target-date-fund design aligns with each plan sponsor’s distinct structure and objectives. For her, every discussion is grounded in how decisions made today directly include plan members’ ability to retire with confidence.
“It all translates into retirement saving,” she says. “But how do we make that translate into sustainable retirement saving?”
The industry’s enduring challenge, Mariamo argues, is an overreliance on fees and historical performance − often at the expense of a more fundamental question. “We’re beginning to see a gradual shift away from being singularly focused on fees and past performance and toward a deeper conversation around investment beliefs and how those align with the broader dynamics of managing a DC scheme,” she says. That shift, she adds, requires a reframing of how risk itself is defined. “Is the real risk a market downturn at the moment an employee retires? Or is it the far greater risk of outliving their savings altogether?”
Mariamo emphasizes that effective glide-path design is not about derisking early but about managing risk with intention to support long-term outcomes. This is where the distinction between “to” and “through” glide paths becomes critical. Retirement happens at different ages, different stages, and in highly personal ways − and a well-designed “through” glide path reflects that reality by sustaining growth potential and helping members remain invested through periods of market stress. As Canadians face longer horizons and more flexible retirement paths, an age-appropriate approach can materially improve retirement-income outcomes.
Looking ahead, Mariamo sees a major shift on the horizon − the gradual emergence of decumulation within institutional plans, allowing members to draw retirement income directly from their DC pension plan while preserving the advantages of institutional-scale fees. Conceptually, the case is compelling. In practice, however, implementation remains complex, requiring regulatory evolution, operational readiness, and shifts in member behaviour. While progress is underway, Mariamo expects it will take some more time before decumulation becomes a meaningful, institutionally adopted feature in Canada.