We conducted one of the largest survey ever made of infrastructure asset owners and managers in 2019 and found that most investors use absolute benchmarks or listed infrastructure indices to determine their investment strategy, monitor performance and manage risk.

The vast majority of respondents also acknowledge major issues with their infrastructure benchmarking practices: current benchmarks are not representative, do not measure risk, do not allow investor to target or define a strategy and do not offer much information about correlations with other asset classes.

Without adequate benchmarks, the development of a global infrastructure asset class, which is one of the objectives of the G20, is necessarily limited, if not compromised.

This situation will evolve and, in all likelihood, improve with the development of the asset class. One could make comparisons with the development and gradual improvements made in other alternative asset classes that began to attract institutional investors a couple of decades ago such as real estate or hedge funds.

Long-term investment in illiquid assets creates a demand for monitoring (as the alternative to trading in and out of the asset class) and as better databases and benchmark offerings are created, growing and successful alternative asset classes like infrastructure begin to the long road towards maturity, transparency and better benchmarks.