If you don’t take care of your customer, your competitor will. —Bob Hooey, Make ME Feel Special!

Our fall 2026 Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) directory features one hundred-five service providers with names, numbers, and emails for each firm.

Our goal is to give new business prospects – pensions, nonprofits, and family offices – an easy, ad-free, no-paywall, no-charge way to find OCIO firms and connect with the right representative.

Relentless growth

AUM topped $6.3 trillion as of June 30, 2026, an 11.8 percent jump ($666bn) from just six months ago. And, as usual, the big got much bigger. Sixteen firms over one hundred billion manage about seventy-six percent of the assets (mostly pension assets) leaving the remaining trillion-five for independents and boutiques.

Looking back over the last four decades, the best time to pitch an outsourced OCIO proposition was probably about thirty years ago. Fewer competitors, better margins, plenty of prospects. But there’s still runway ahead for the go-getters. Here’s a rough estimate of total investable assets for the nonprofit, non-pension market:

$1.786 trillion – private foundations
$0.177 billion – community foundations
$1.000 trillion – endowments
$0.600 billion – hospitals, health systems
$0.300 billion – religious organizations
$0.070 billion – museums
$3.933 trillion

The corporate defined benefit business is a land unto its own, actuarial, regulated, and liability driven, with a focus on funding levels and cost reduction. Better to let Marsh, Goldman, Blackrock, et al., deal with those headaches.

New business for most OCIOs will come from private wealth and related foundations, a booming market. But when it comes to the moneyed class it’s all about service.

Speaking of service

A sizable southern foundation called a few weeks ago to discuss their OCIO’s poor service. Didn’t matter that the 10-year investment performance was excellent – our data put them in the top third. According to the board their OCIO responds late to their requests and pays lip service to their concerns. They were here to talk about a change.

When families are asked what qualities are most important in a client service advisor, trust and responsiveness top the list. And yet, after twenty years working with OCIOs – recruiting, consulting, M&A, this directory – poor service and communication is today’s number one complaint.

Maybe it’s turnover and the lamentable loss of passion and focus. Once a founder sells it’s hard to sustain that intensity and vision. Most OCIO trailblazers have been in business for thirty to forty years, some longer, and many are aging out.

Unless an OCIO is family-owned like Hirtle & Co. with succession in place, or that rare private partnership with a two-hundred-year-old history like Brown Brothers Harriman, merging is usually inevitable. 

With heady valuations, it’s hard to say no to a generous offer. In the last few years, Hall Capital, NEPC, Agility, Truvvo, Ellwood Associates, New Providence, CornerStone, PFM, and Permit Capital, among others, have snuggled up to big money patrons.

Mr. Hirtle, industry doyen and long-standing client, describes the challenge this way:

Over the past decade and more, markets have been so consistently productive that almost everyone is capturing historically strong returns. So, differentiation in our business depends on exceptional professional service.

Daniel Kahneman famously differentiated the perfectly rational humanoid “econs” of the economic textbooks – who only care about performance – from real people with real everyday emotions, pressures, and concerns which he called “humans”.

Exemplary service means focusing on our clients’ success and well-being, those human elements Professor Kahneman describes. Our mission is to ease their minds and help keep their commitments. We never want to disappoint them. That means both strong performance and great client care.

—Charles Skorina