STATE OF WISCONSIN INVESTMENT BOARD

The State Of Wisconsin Investment Board, or SWIB for short, was created in 1951 and primarily serves to manage the assets of various state trust funds. The agency is required to make investment decisions related to pension funds “solely for the benefit of the members of the Wisconsin Retirement System” using “the diligence, skill and care that a prudent investor would use in managing a large public pension fund.” The board of trustees are at the top of the organization and are responsible for making decisions about SWIB’s overall investment management policies, including asset allocation, investment guidelines, and performance benchmarks with reviews on a month basis. The board is made up of nine members and are also responsible for appointing the executive director and director of internal audit. The executive staff, which operates under the board of trustees, is made up of eight members, each serving a very specific oversight role, with the current executive director Michael Williamson, who has over three and a half decades of experience in the public sector, overseeing the staff. SWIB currently holds over 102 billion in total assets under management. Most of these assets, approximately 93%, come from the Wisconsin Retirement System trust funds that serves over 580 thousand people. The rest of the organization’s assets are made out of the State Investment Fund (about 6%), which is a cash balance from various state and local governmental units, and five other state trust funds that make up about 1% of total assets, including the Injured Patients and Families Compensation Fund, State Life Insurance Fund, Local Government Property Insurance Fund, Tuition Trust Fund, and State Historical Society of Wisconsin Endowment Fund. The investment performance goal of the agency is for its Core Fund, the larger of the two funds in the Wisconsin Retirement System which is fully diversified and balanced, and Variable Fund, an equity stock fund that fully reflect market changes and have a higher degree of risk, to exceed the benchmarks set by the Trustees.