No one knows exactly when the Southern Cottontail Rabbit diverged from its other 19 (or so) North American Cottontail cousins, becoming its own distinct species of bunny.

In evolution these things just happen.

Similarly, among financial institutions, modern banks seem to have evolved from traditional moneylenders somewhere in northern Italy in the late 14th century.  But that fateful development could only be recognized in retrospect.

Our friend John Hirtle, of Hirtle, Callaghan & Co, claims that he (with fellow Goldman Sachs vet Donald Callaghan) birthed the OCIO species in 1988.  He’s a very nice (and imposing) man, so we take him at his word.

In any case, there were soon several smallish firms pursuing the OCIO business model in the early 1990s.

The core idea was to offer a diversified and full-discretion money management function to family offices and others who could no longer effectively or affordably do the job in-house (even with the help of traditional trust banking services).

The job was becoming too sophisticated and complex, both conceptually and operationally.

Observing their success, a number of larger firms joined the scrum in the OCIO space and, in a couple of decades we had the OCIO landscape of today, managing not just billions, but trillions of dollars.  And reaping proportionate fees therefrom.

We’ve been charting the growth of the OCIO industry for the past decade in our annual OCIO report and the heirs of Hirtle, big and small, seem (mostly) to have flourished.

In our shiny new 2019 report we observe that total OCIO assets grew from $1.98 Trillion to $2.38 Trillion. That’s a year-over-year growth rate of 19 percent.

That’s pretty impressive! But, the AUM increase is not as vigorous as the annual growth over the previous four years (2014 through 2018).  And some of the increase represents a “reclassification of assets” at two OCIO providers.

So, three decades into the OCIO era, we’re minded to ask whether the OCIO growth rate may be slowing, maybe even plateauing.  Are the OCIO rabbits multiplying faster than the green, green grass of customer money they live on?

Let’s consider the evidence, both statistical and anecdotal.

The hard numbers