< The 2015 Pension 40: The Long Climb

From her perch overseeing $45 billion in the combined pension and savings plan assets of 200,000 employees at United Technologies Corp., and an additional $8 billion in international pension assets, chief investment officer Robin Diamonte, 51, has increasingly engaged in the national debate over retirement income security . Not content to merely redesign the multinational’s $20 billion savings plan by dramatically slashing participant costs and, in 2012, rolling out a lifetime income option that now stands at $800 million, with a goal of $1 billion in participant assets, Diamonte regularly travels to Washington to speak with federal pension officials about such knotty problems as the need for fiduciary oversight to shield retiree assets from heavily sold and often expensive individual retirement accounts. “I want to figure out ways to help people retire, like supporting the [Department of Labor] fiduciary rule,” says the CIO. At the invitation of Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, Diamonte spoke in July at the once-in-a-decade White House Conference on Aging on how UTC gets participants to start saving early. She currently serves on the Pension Benefit Guaranty Corp.’s advisory committee looking at the federal agency’s liability stream, investment policy and policy on multiemployer plans, and was recently named to Chicago-based Morningstar’s board of directors.

 
The 2015 Pension 40

1. Bruce Rauner Illinois 2. John & Laura Arnold Laura and John Arnold Foundation Sponsored Seeking Resilience in Gravity-defying Stock Markets Sponsored by Schroders October 20, 2025 3. Chris Christie New Jersey 4. Randi Weingarten AmericanFederation of Teachers 5. Phyllis Borzi U.S. Department of Labor

6. Kevin de León California 7. Alejandro García Padilla Commonwealth ofPuerto Rico 8. Laurence Fink BlackRock 9. Rahm Emanuel Chicago 10. Sean McGarvey North AmericanBuilding Trades Unions

11. John Kline Minnesota 12. J. Mark Iwry U.S. Treasury Department 13. Damon Silvers AFL-CIO 14. Jeffrey Immelt General Electric Co. 15. Joshua Gotbaum Brookings Institution

16. Robin Diamonte United Technologies Corp. 17. Mark Mullet Washington 18. Terry O'Sullivan Laborers' International Union of North America 19. Raymond Dalio Bridgewater Associates 20. Ted Wheeler Oregon

21. Thomas Nyhan Central States Southeast and Southwest Areas Pension Fund 22. Karen Ferguson & Karen Friedman Pensions Rights Center 23. Randy DeFrehn National Coordinating Committee forMultiemployer Plans 24. Robert O'Keef Motorola Solutions 25. Caitlin Long Morgan Stanley

26. Kenneth Feinberg The Law Offices of Kenneth R. Feinberg 27. Orrin Hatch Utah 28. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend Center for Retirement Initiatives, Georgetown University 29. Ian Lanoff Groom Law Group 30. Joshua Rauh Stanford Graduate School of Business

31. Ted Eliopoulos California Public Employees' Retirement System 32. Edward (Ted) Siedle Benchmark Financial Services 33. Teresa Ghilarducci New School for Social Research 34. Denise Nappier Connecticut 35. W. Thomas Reeder Jr. Pension BenefitGuaranty Corp.

36. Hank Kim National Conference on Public Employee Retirement Systems 37. Paul Singer Elliott Management Corp. 38. Bailey Childers National PublicPension Coalition 39. Amy Kessler Prudential Financial 40. Judy Mares U.S. Labor Department