Hans Wilhelm Korfmacher, the chief executive officer of WPV, the German pension fund for auditors and chartered accountants, will retire at the end of June, leaving the helm of the scheme after 30 years to the other two managing directors currently in charge.
“My contract expires on 30 June. In the future, the current members of the management board, Silke Wolf and Sascha Pinger, will continue to lead [the scheme],” Korfmacher told IPE.
Pinger is currently chief investment officer, responsible also for IT and digitisation at WPV, while Wolf is responsible for risk management, sustainability, legal/compliance/data protection, according to the pension fund.
After retiring, and stepping down from his role at WPV, Korfmacher will continue to hold the position of managing director of the subsidiary WPV Advisory & Asset Management, until a successor is named, he said.
“Furthermore, I will remain active as a lawyer, and within a limited time frame as an adviser to the supervisory body of the WPV and, if necessary, to other clients, in particular [in the area of] investment,” he added.
Korfmacher has been chair of WPV’s board for more than 30 years, practically since it was founded in 1993. The decision on how to run the scheme in the future and on his succcessors had been taken a while ago.
Going forward, all decisions in the areas that Korfmacher had previously been responsible for will be made together with his colleagues. In some cases the responsibilities having already been transferred to both Pinger and Wolf, he said, referring to the management of the scheme until he steps down.
Looking back, he said the pension fund started with just three employees, rising to 60 over the years until now.
Reflecting about the future of WPV and the occupational pensions in Germany, the outgoing CEO is convinced that the scheme will secure occupational pensions for auditors and accountants in the next few decades.
“It is essential to create an organisation that has experts for all asset classes,” he said, adding that the scheme invested the “first few million Deutschmarks” in April 1994, and now assets total more that €5bn.
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