On 5 February 2025, the National Employment Savings Trust — NEST, the UK's largest defined-contribution pension scheme, with £39 billion in assets and 13.5 million members — did something no overseas institution had done before: it bought a piece of IFM Investors itself. NEST acquired a 10% stake in Industry Super Holdings, the Australian superannuation holding company that has owned IFM since its founding. The remaining 90% is shared among 15 Australian super funds.

The move is more than symbolic. NEST has committed to deploy approximately £5 billion through IFM-managed strategies by 2030, and has already made its first move: in April 2025, it seeded a new IFM Global Infrastructure Debt Fund with €530 million, targeting sub-investment-grade European infrastructure. A further £200 million has been committed to a joint climate-credit initiative.

IFM's airport investment story begins in 1997, when it simultaneously took stakes in Brisbane, Melbourne, and Perth airports as part of the Australian Federal Government's privatisation programme. Those three positions — held for nearly thirty years — remain in the portfolio today, supplemented by later acquisitions in Sydney (2022), Manchester (2013), Vienna (2014), and Toluca (2023).

Over 165 million passengers were handled across IFM-invested airports in 2024 — a figure that would place it, if consolidated, among the world's five largest airport operators by traffic.