The women expanding Fidelity’s institutional capabilities
Canadian institutional investors are asking fundamentally different questions today than they were five years ago.
As pension plans mature, governance becomes more sophisticated and portfolios expand beyond traditional public markets, investment conversations have shifted from selecting managers to solving increasingly complex long-term challenges.
Today, plan sponsors are balancing retirement outcomes with investment performance, evaluating how private markets fit within diversified portfolios, and they are looking for partners who understand not only investments, but governance, implementation and member needs.
Recognizing these changes, Fidelity Canada has deliberately evolved its institutional business around these issues that matter most to clients.
Leading that evolution is Tracey Wong, Vice President, Institutional Sales and Service, who heads the institutional business for Fidelity Canada. With nearly three decades at Fidelity, she has helped shape the firm’s institutional strategy and establish it as a trusted partner to many of Canada’s largest pension plans, endowments, foundations and defined contribution plan sponsors. Under her leadership, Fidelity continues to expand its institutional capabilities by investing in areas that reflect where the market is heading, including retirement solutions and private markets.
As head of the Institutional business, Wong is responsible for its strategic direction and growth across Canada. Throughout her career, Wong has believed that sustainable growth starts by listening to clients. Rather than responding only to today’s investment opportunities, she focuses on anticipating tomorrow’s challenges: helping shape Fidelity’s priorities around retirement solutions, private markets and innovative investment capabilities before they become mainstream client demands.
“The institutional landscape is constantly evolving. Our role is to anticipate where our clients are going, understand the challenges they’re trying to solve and ensure we’re building the capabilities and expertise they’ll need for the future,” Wong says.
When discussing what the market is focused on, Wong identifies two dominant themes. She points first to solutions for the Defined Contribution (DC)/Capital Accumulation Plans markets through target date strategies where she sees 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 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 many grey areas. We’re solving for the same problem, but we’re getting to it very differently.”
The second theme Wong points to is alternatives. Allocations have grown from around 3% to as high as 45% in some plans, spanning defined benefit 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, infrastructure and private equity, 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 of both Fidelity’s target date strategies and alternative solutions.
Wong believes institutional investing has become too complex for any one individual to be an expert in every area.
Instead, she has built a team that brings together complementary expertise while remaining united by a single objective: putting clients first.
Supporting these solutions and working to advance these two important areas of Fidelity’s institutional growth agenda are Stéphanie Mariamo and Charissa Lai.
Stéphanie Mariamo, focused on Fidelity’s defined contribution business development initiatives, works with plan sponsors and consultants to help organizations improve retirement outcomes through innovative retirement solutions.
Charissa Lai leads Fidelity’s Institutional alternative initiatives with consultants, helping expand awareness and understanding of Fidelity’s alternative capabilities available to institutional investors. She also partners with the distribution team to support the development of institutional initiatives with plan sponsors, helping them evaluate how private markets and other alternative investments can support their long-term portfolio objectives.
Together, they represent the complementary expertise helping Fidelity meet the evolving needs of institutional investors.
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. That experience helps Fidelity have broader conversations with clients about the role workplace savings play within a household’s overall financial future.
Fidelity has decades of experience in retirement solutions. It was the first to launch target date strategies through fundamental research, retirement education and ongoing innovation. Fidelity helps plan sponsors move beyond simply accumulating assets toward improving the quality of retirement outcomes for Canadian families.
Our engagement with plan sponsors has evolved. 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?”
Spotlight
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, alternatives such as private credit, private equity, and real estate, fixed-income, asset allocation and custom solutions.
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“Building a strong institutional business is about having the right expertise in the right places, but also making sure everyone is working toward the same objective: understanding our clients and helping them navigate an increasingly complex 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 Sep 22, 2026
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Stéphanie Mariamo
Tracey Wong
Charissa Lai
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A peek behind the curtain of how Fidelity Canada Institutional connects portfolio construction to governance, communication, and member outcomes
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“Most investors understand the concept of vintage diversification; the challenge is maintaining that discipline when conditions become uncomfortable”
Charissa Lai, Fidelity
Fidelity Canada Institutional
Recent years have tested investor conviction in private markets. Public markets have outperformed, distributions have slowed, and many institutional investors have become increasingly cautious about committing capital to private equity and private credit.
It is a pattern Charissa Lai has seen before.
Lai began her career in investment banking at Morgan Stanley in South Africa and the U.K. before moving to Canada's pension system at CPP Investments, where she invested across private markets. Her experience spans manager selection, co-investments, secondaries, asset allocation and portfolio construction, giving her a holistic perspective on how institutional portfolios are built and managed.
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First target-date solution launched
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Today, that experience shapes how she engages institutional investors and consultants at Fidelity. Increasingly, clients are evaluating how private markets fit within broader portfolio objectives during a period of heightened uncertainty.
According to Lai, one of the industry's central challenges is the tendency to evaluate private markets through short-term comparisons with public markets. "We're seeing a critical shift in how institutions evaluate their private asset programs," Lai says. "The market is asking whether private markets still offer value when public indices have outperformed. The more important question is how private markets contribute to the overall portfolio and whether investors can maintain conviction when sentiment turns against the asset class."
Having invested through multiple market cycles, Lai has observed that investor sentiment and investment opportunity do not always move together. In her view, investors often become most cautious at precisely the moments when maintaining exposure matters most. In the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, capital was abundant and competition for deals was intense. Following the crisis, deal activity slowed sharply and many investors became hesitant to commit capital. Yet many of the vintages raised between 2009 and 2011 ultimately proved to be among the strongest performers in private equity.1 "Most investors understand the concept of vintage diversification," Lai says. "The challenge is maintaining that discipline when conditions become uncomfortable."
Having seen this play out firsthand, Lai believes successful private markets programs depend as much on governance as investment skill. Institutions often have well-developed policies, but executing consistently through periods of uncertainty requires alignment across investment teams and asset-allocation decision makers. In her experience, pacing programs and governance structures are critical tools for helping investors stay committed to long-term plans, rather than being impacted by short-term market sentiment.
Looking ahead, Lai sees the continued stratification of private markets as one of the defining challenges facing institutional investors. "In the past, institutions focused primarily on broad asset-class strategies," Lai says. "Today, the opportunity set is far more specialized." Within private markets, investors are evaluating not only primary funds and co-investments but also secondaries and a diverse range of private credit strategies. The secondaries market alone now spans private equity, venture capital and private credit exposures, including both LP-led and GP-led transactions, each offering distinct portfolio construction characteristics. "The future belongs to institutions that understand where within an increasingly stratified opportunity set they want to take risk, and have the governance and discipline to deploy capital consistently across market cycles."
The evolution continues
In a landscape more complex than ever before, Canadian institutional investors’ investment decisions must balance long-term objectives with governance, regulation, member outcomes and evolving market opportunities.
Under Tracey Wong’s leadership, Fidelity has built a team whose expertise spans the full spectrum of institutional investing, from strategic client partnerships and retirement solutions to private markets and innovative investment strategies. Together, Fidelity is intentionally building the capabilities needed to help clients navigate an increasingly complex investment landscape.
“Our clients expect more than an investment manager,” says Wong. “They want thoughtful partners who understand where the industry is headed and can bring the right people, ideas and capabilities together to help them make better long-term decisions.”
As institutional investing continues to evolve, Fidelity believes its greatest competitive advantage is not only the breadth of its global investment platform, but the strength of the people leading those conversations.
1 Preqin, The case for vintage diversification, July 27, 2025
Charissa Lai
Director, institutional private markets
Stéphanie Mariamo
Vice president, institutional business development
Tracey Wong
Vice president, sales and service
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The industry’s enduring challenge, she 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 argues 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.
"If the goal is to help employees avoid outliving their retirement savings and better achieve retirement outcomes, that’s where the conversation should start,” she says. "Begin with the outcome you’re trying to solve for and work backwards from there. The glide path is one of the most important methods for getting there - it should be designed to support the retirement outcome you’re ultimately trying to achieve.”
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.
Charissa Lai, director, institutional private markets
Issued by Fidelity Investments Canada ULC (“FIC”). Unless otherwise stated, all views expressed are those of FIC.
This document does not constitute a distribution, an offer or solicitation to engage the investment management services of Fidelity, or an offer to buy or sell or the solicitation of any offer to buy or sell any securities in any jurisdiction or country where such distribution or offer is not authorized or would be contrary to local laws or regulations. Fidelity makes no representations that the contents are appropriate for use in all locations or that the transactions or services discussed are available or appropriate for sale or use in all jurisdictions or countries or by all investors or counterparties.
These materials may contain statements that are “forward-looking statements,” which are based on certain assumptions of future events. Forward-looking statements are based on information available on the date hereof, and Fidelity Investments Canada ULC (“FIC”) does not assume any duty to update any forward-looking statement. Actual events may differ from those assumed by FIC when developing forward-looking statements. There can be no assurance that forward-looking statements, including any projected returns, will materialize or that actual market conditions and/or performance results will not be materially different or worse than those presented. Past performance is not a reliable indicator of future results.
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