Charles Skorina & Company
● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●
Our clients: visionary families, transformative nonprofits, Wall Street trailblazers
Our vision: build investment preeminence, create opportunity, enrich lives
Our work: provide talent, access, relationships, and insights
LATEST NEWSLETTER
The mind can only absorb what the seat can endure. — Unknown
Our summer 2026 Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) directory update features one-hundred-eight service providers with contact names, numbers, and emails for each. Our goal is to help families and institutions locate, review, and connect with full-service discretionary outsource investment managers. No ads, no paywall, no charge.
OCIO AUM reached $5.64 trillion at the end of 2025, an 8.9 percent jump ($463bn) from a year ago. And, as usual, the big got bigger. Fifteen firms over one hundred billion manage about seventy-five percent of the assets (mostly pension assets) leaving roughly a trillion four for the pros and pretenders.
Keeping commitments
The outsourced full-discretion investment business is hyper-competitive, hard to differentiate, and expensive to scale, with hundreds of players including RIAs, banks, brokers, and asset managers all competing for institutional and ultra-high-net-worth discretionary mandates. It’s hard to cut through the clutter.
Worse still, few OCIOs are able to convincingly explain their competitive edge or why it should matter. Most firms read the same on paper. So when it comes down to finals, empathy and likeability usually clinch the deal.
My conclusion after years working with both OCIOs and their clients? Families and nonprofits really don’t care about a firm’s “passion for investing,” they care about service and security and keeping promises, not swaps and overlays and some proprietary secret sauce.
Investment performance may rule one out, but it’s seldom the reason for a winning selection.
The OCIO story is a compelling proposition for many institutions and high-net-worth families, but it’s an intensely competitive arena. If you are not taking care of your client, someone else will.
Stepping up, or stepping out
While some OCIOs up their game, others are moving on. FEG and Hirtle & Co. recently rebranded and reaffirmed their commitments, while Cambridge Associates redoubled its efforts and topped $100 billion full-discretion AUM. Organic growth, not M&A.
Others like Mill Creek, Verus, RockCreek, and Russell (yet again?) have decamped for better-resourced patrons. And, just the other day, Fiducient Advisors, part of Wealthspire, now owned by Madison Dearborn Partners, recently announced plans to acquire Sellwood Investment Partners. M&A every which way.
Without a plan for succession and the resources to compete there’s little choice but to sell, or merge.
Speaking of which, we have a client, a regional financial corporation with significant multi-state banking and investment operations, who is seeking to augment their outsourced, full-discretion, institutional, investment management capabilities through acquisitions, mergers, and creative partnerships. In short, we’re looking for a few like-minded, ambitious, established OCIOs. Call us if you would like to discuss.
Hirtle & Co., fresh paint, time-honored values
While we’re on the subject of client-centric care, take a look at Hirtle & Co.’s recent rebrand, a firm I’ve known for years. In the firm’s letter to clients managing director Susan McEvoy captures the essence of money and mission:
“What matters more to us is what that capital [client AUM] is multiplying in the world: medical research, education, the arts, and the communities we call home; missions that outlast all of us.”
In founder Jon Hirtle’s words, “I joined Goldman right out of the service (The Marine Corps), with a strong sense of idealism and mission. On my first day in training, I asked my mentor to describe ‘the noble cause.’ He immediately replied, ‘The client.’” That said it all.
Who’s who
If a firm says they provide OCIO services, and their website suggests they do, we’ll usually list them upon request.
However, each OCIO has its own culture, client mix, investment style, and biases. Some firms focus on indexing and liquid markets, others on alternatives, still others on ESG. Some customize portfolios for clients, others don’t. Big, small, specialists, generalists, there’s no lack of choice.
Our advice? When shopping for an OCIO, it pays to be thorough. I recently reviewed investment office performance, operations, and talent with the board of a major university. After numerous interviews with trustees and chief investment officers my final report included one particular caveat from the front: once a family or foundation commits to a partner, an OCIO relationship is not easily undone.
—Charles Skorina
(down PDF newsletter & directory)
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ABOUT
Adela Skenderasi, new CIO, Cystic Fibrosis Foundation
Brendon Reay, new MD investments Bush Foundation
Mark L. Baumgartner, new CEO/CIO University of Florida Investment Corp
Katharine “K.C.” Krieger, new CIO at The Getty
x CIO, The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation , x Cambridge Associates, BA Colby College
SKORINA IN THE NEWS
2-19-25 Institutional Investor: Most endowment returns aren’t high enough to cover universities’ costs
11-15-24 Institutional Investor: Nokia taps mercer to navigate evolving corporate pensions
5-7-21 BloombergNews: Yale Names Alex Banker Interim Endowment Chief, Plans Search
5-6-21 The New York Times: David Swensen, Who Revolutionized Endowment Investing, Dies at 67
5-6-21 Forbes: Yale Endowment Chief David Swensen Leaves Legacy of Top College Investment Leaders
CHARLES A. SKORINA & COMPANY works with leaders of Endowments, Foundations, and Institutional Asset Managers to recruit Board Members, Executives Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Fund Managers.
Mr. Skorina also publishes THE SKORINA LETTER, a widely-read professional publication providing news, research and analysis on institutional asset managers and tax-exempt funds.
Our Practice:
• We recruit Board Members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers and Senior Asset Managers.
• Our research and analytics are backed by over thirty years of hands-on recruiting experience and an unrivaled personal network.
• We collect performance, compensation, and background data on most senior institutional investment professionals in the U.S. and the funds they manage. We analyze that data to construct profiles of those managers and their funds, identify best-in-class people, and map their career trajectories.
• We share our research and insights in a widely-read professional newsletter – THE SKORINA LETTER – and website – www.charlesskorina.com.
• The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Thompson Reuters, Financial Times (Fundfire), Institutional Investor, Pensions & Investments, Private Equity International, and the institutional investment community use our research and analysis. Skorina has been interviewed on chief investment officer compensation issues on Bloomberg TV.
• Our work is regularly re-printed in Allaboutalpha.com and other industry magazines, blogs, and third- party web postings.
• We focus specifically and effectively on the world we know: Board members and Executive Officers, Chief Investment Officers, and Senior Asset Managers at institutional investment firms and funds – including sovereign wealth funds, endowments, foundations, pension funds, banks, investment banks, outsourced chief investment officer firms (OCIO), and sell-side money managers.
Prior to founding CASCo, Mr. Skorina worked for JP MorganChase in New York City and Chicago and for Ernst & Young in Washington, D.C.
Mr. Skorina graduated from Culver Academies, attended Michigan State University and The Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey where he graduated with a BA, and earned a MBA in Finance from the University of Chicago. He served in the US Army as a Russian Linguist stationed in Japan.
Charles A. Skorina & Co. is based in Tucson, Arizona.
Washington University: movin’ on up
Diversification is protection against ignorance; it makes little sense if you know what you are doing. —Warren Buffett (1996 annual meeting)
How boards and investment offices make all the difference
Janet Lorin, Bloomberg News, reported recently that Washington University in St. Louis (WashU) could see an astonishing 3000 percent return on their endowment’s $50 million dollar investment in SpaceX.
When asked how this came about, Scott Wilson, WashU’s prescient chief investment officer said, “We try to find really great partners and do interesting things. When they find something that is super attractive we try to add capital to those individual ideas.”
[For a more substantive reveal, here’s a recent interview with Mr. Wilson, courtesy of Ted Seides, Capital Allocators]
No free lunch
There has been a perceptible shift the last few years away from broadly diversified asset-class constructs toward more concentrated portfolios.
Jagdeep Singh Bachher, Ph.D. and chief investment officer at the University of California regents, wrote in UC’s 2025 annual report that his staff intends to invest in fewer, higher quality, top-performing assets.
“Experience has shown us the value of lean, high-performance teams working collaboratively to manage a concentrated, high-conviction portfolio.
We’ve greatly reduced the number of external managers we use and the number of line items on our books. That makes it easier to understand what we own, especially in a crisis, and gives us fewer decisions to make.
The result is a small, agile team laser-focused on areas where we can outperform the market.”
Boards matter
Concentration and high conviction are all well and good, but how many university trustees have the fortitude to weather unruly markets? As it is, the double-edged attacks on university budgets from research cuts and endowments taxes have put schools in serious binds.
Richard J. Chang, reporting for FundFire (an FT service), noted recently that large endowments contribute on average about ten percent to university budgets, (source: Christian Tiu, associate professor of finance at the University at Buffalo School of Management).
However, some schools lean on their endowment for much greater support, in Princeton’s case for example, sixty-five percent of the 2026-27 operating budget.
Mr. Wilson’s winning ways
Embracing risk is a hard sell on campus these days.
As a former Wall Street trader, fly-over college CIO, and staunch individualist, how many schools would have hired Mr. Wilson as chief investment officer do you suppose? When, by our latest count, nearly two-thirds of university CIOs come from peer group endowments.
Fortunately, the WashU trustees spotted a winner and signed him up. And thanks to Mr. Wilson and his investment team, the endowment has moved from fourth to top quartile and even top decile since Scott joined in late Q4 2017.
In our latest endowment performance report, WashU ranked seventh out of one-hundred twenty-two schools over one billion AUM for the ten-year period ending June 30, 2025, doubling in size on Mr. Wilson’s watch from roughly seven billion to over fifteen billion dollars while maintaining a yearly distribution of four to five percent.
The rest of the story . . . (Paul Harvey 1918 – 2009, ABC News Radio)
How WashU built a winning team.
The Washington University in St. Louis endowment had been underperforming its peer group for years and by 2016 the trustees had had enough.
So, the President and board forged a commitment to pursue whatever measures necessary to build a preeminent investment organization – keenly aware that better returns add millions, even billions, to school coffers over time.
In 2016, while he was still CIO of Makena (OCIO), the WashU board asked Eric Upin, an alumnus, university trustee, board chair of the investment management company (and former Stanford CIO) to serve as Interim CIO and Chair of the Search Committee – with emphasis on restructuring portfolio strategy, the investment team, board governance, compensation, and retention.
As a Trustee with full-on university support, Mr. Upin wielded a forceful writ.
The IMC board began their transformation with unvarnished self-reflection and concluded that tentative, short-term thinking was part of their problem. This, in turn, had led to conflicted guidance and mixed signaling to the investment staff.
The board asked:
During the year and a half period before hiring Scott Wilson, the board studied the qualities and characteristics of top-performing endowments and portfolios, as well as those that consistently underperformed or fell out of the elite class.
In total, the board spent five years working on governance, compensation, and liquidity management.
Lessons learned
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