The price of ability does not depend on merit but on supply and demand. – George Bernard Shaw

For our summer 2023 OCIO directory we wrote: Despite the Nasdaq losing a third of its value, 33%, the Russell 3000 down by 20.48%, the S&P 500 off 20%, and the Dow shedding 9%, total outsourced assets on our list dipped a tenable 9.5%, or $356 billion to $3.4 trillion.

How quickly time flies.  Today, with global markets hitting record highs, our latest directory flush with providers, and related AUM over five trillion dollars, discretionary outsourcers of every persuasion are charging ahead chasing assets and fees.

But we can’t help but wonder, are there really that many fully-integrated, conflict-free, financially-grounded, independent investment offices – to paraphrase Hirtle Callaghan’s raison d’etre – fit and able to serve the needs of families, foundations, and related nonprofits?

Supply and demand, duh!

There’s torrential demand as waves of new money seek professional advice.  And a supply gusher as stalwarts and wannabes rewire their practices for OCIO prospects.

Every week it seems someone we’ve never heard of with three, four hundred million comes calling.  Their wealth has surged, they’ve funded a foundation – or sit on the board – and it’s all getting out of hand.  Everyone’s after a piece of their pie, they’ve browsed through our directory, and they’re looking for a firm they can trust.

“The US commands an extraordinary 34% of global liquid private wealth and houses 37% of the world’s millionaire population according to the latest Henley & Partners wealth report.  And this wealth dominance extends across all brackets, with 36% of the world’s centi-millionaires (those with USD +100 million) and 33% of its billionaires residing in the US.”

Eying the celestial end of the wealth spectrum, the Wall Street Journal reports: “The net worth held by the top 0.1% of households in the U.S. reached $23.3 trillion in the second quarter this year, from $10.7 trillion a decade earlier, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. The amount held by the bottom 50% increased to $4.2 trillion from $900 billion over that period.”

The big squeeze

Pricing plans are crumbling as cost increases and fee compression undercut margins.  Revenue on managed assets topped $58 billion in 2024 announced Boston Consulting Group, but almost three-fourths of the gain (70%) came from market performance and a move to lower-priced products.

Meanwhile, it takes a small fortune to field a full-service institutional grade practice as compensation, sourcing, due diligence, cyber-security, audits, and compliance expenses continue to climb.

“Shifts in product offerings and approaches to distribution, industry-wide consolidation, and the need for radically leaner cost structures” are behind the squeeze.  To fatten margins, BCG suggests offering actively managed assets such as active ETFs, model portfolios, and separately managed accounts, and offering private assets to retail clients.

But therein lies a dilemma.  To truly serve clients, aren’t discretionary outsourcers obliged to avoid the conflicts and temptations endemic in money management?  Alicia McElhaney, Institutional Investor, describes the quandary:

“A pioneer in the outsourced chief investment officer business says it’s necessary to be both a pure-play provider — with no products to sell — and have scale.  A large asset manager believes disclosing and managing potential conflicts is enough.  A search consultant says no OCIO is truly free of competing interests.”

OCIOs everywhere

What exactly is an outsourced chief investment officer?  To date there’s no industry standard or designated authority to police the usurpers.

We publish our directory to help families and institutions locate, review, and connect with full-service discretionary outsource investment managers.  If a firm says they provide OCIO services, and their website suggests they do, we usually, though not always, add them. But there sure are a lot of them.

[For this issue we removed five firms and added one, Third Lake Partners.]

Institutional grade OCIOs are sophisticated operations.  The crème de la crème have years of experience – time to fully hone systems, service, succession, and investment capabilities.  Hirtle Callaghan and Blackrock opened for business in 1988, McMorgan & Company set up shop in 1969, Brown Brothers Harriman and JPMorgan Chase date back over two centuries.

Adding to the muddle, 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.

Final thoughts

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 nonprofit and UHNW discretionary mandates. It’s hard to cut through the clutter.

To quote an industry veteran: “As more and more thoughtful investors recognize the power and promise of OCIO, it’s time to review its three primary requirements.

• A Conflict-Free Structure: OCIO requires a structure that is conflict-free and truly open architecture with no products or hidden corporate agendas to confound decision making.
• Purchasing Power: OCIO requires sufficient purchasing power to pay for talent and support to fully exploit global complexity, noise, and opportunity.
• An Investment Management Culture: OCIOs require a point-accountable, investment management culture.”

Our advice? When looking for an OCIO, it pays to be thorough. Once a family or foundation (or pension fund, healthcare system, insurance company, etc.) commits to a partner, an OCIO relationship is not easily undone.

Charles Skorina

————————————————–

(download PDF directory only)

Outsourced Chief Investment Officer

(OCIO) Directory, Fall 2025

If I disagree with something, I either bet against it, or I keep silent – Amarillo Slim

It’s been a festive fifty years for the alternative investment industry, with private equity the belle of the ball. And as Chuck Prince, former CEO of Citigroup once remarked, “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” But no matter how compelling the party, there are usually a few contrarians lingering in the wings.

Ken Frier, CEO of OCIO firm Atlas Capital Advisors, wrote recently that “The signs are clear, the non-profit model, where the energy goes toward selection of alternative investment managers, is bearing less fruit.

That’s the case even for the Yale endowment – their performance beat a simple 90/10 stock/bond index portfolio by 6.2% in 1994 – 2004, by 3.6% in 2004 – 2014 and just 1.2% in 2014 – 2024. And that 1.2% in the past decade is overstated since Yale cannot sell their private holdings at the reported value.”

Maybe so, but with private equity forecast to double from $5.8tn in 2023 to $12.0tn in 2029 and the “barbarians” storming the retail 401(k) ramparts, one can’t help but wonder what the smart money is up to. As Ben Carlson, A wealth of common Sense, quipped, “being a contrarian is easier in hindsight.”

Most big dollar state pensions still follow the herd. CalPERS recently announced they’re going large on private assets with a target 40% allocation, about $225 billion of the $563 billion dollar fund.

As for CalPERS peers, Stephen L. Nesbitt, CEO & CIO of institutional consultant Cliffwater reported last year that allocations to alternatives reached 40% of state pension assets in 2022, with PE at 14.85% as of 6-30-23.

State Pension Allocations

June 30, 2018 to June 30, 2023

(link to chart)

Non-profit Investment staffs try their best, but most go to the same conferences, use the same consultants, follow the same trends, and invest with the same managers as their peers. Career risk is too great to “think different” when politicians and media trolls lie in wait for any and every mistake.

Pinching pennies

Despite the grumbling, fees still don’t seem to matter much to the institutional crowd. Richard Ennis, former co-founder of consulting firm EnnisKnupp (now AON), thinks the herd pays too much for too little.

“Alts bring extraordinary costs but ordinary returns – namely, those of the underlying equity and fixed income assets.” Ennis finds big endowments in his study – estimated to hold 65% of assets in alternative investments – fare worse than pensions, which have a 35% exposure.

When compared with a market index that he designed with a specific stock-bond mix to mimic funds’ risk profile, endowments have trailed by 2.4 percentage points annually in the 16 years through June 2024. Over the same period, pensions undershot their benchmark by 1 percentage point a year.”

Callan recently published their 2025 Cost of Doing Business Study – “a comprehensive look at the investment management fees paid by institutional investors.” Here are a few highlights from the press release:

“Total investment management fees averaged 40 basis points (bps) across all asset pools. But this headline figure masked significant variation across investor types:

• Nonprofits continued to pay the most, averaging 57 bps, driven by larger allocations to alternatives.
• Public funds averaged 43 bps, but the largest plans resembled nonprofits in both structure and fees.
• Corporate funds averaged 30 bps, driven by growing use of liability-driven investing (LDI).
• Insurance pools, with their conservative asset allocations, were the lowest at 20 bps.”

To be fair

Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me. ― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Suppose the Princeton or Yale endowment investment staff wanted to go all-in on a single stock? Forget diversification and the free lunches, just one shoot-the-moon can’t lose security. Think their trustees would go for it? Can elephants fly? Of course not.

And yet, this is the case for some of the biggest winners in the foundation world, funds like the Jen-Hsun & Lori Huang Foundation and the Lilly Endowment.

So, here’s a question. Does foundation management mirror the personalities and proclivities of their anomalous founders? And, if so, how have these various styles affected investment performance over the last five years?

For example, a preference for public markets versus alternatives, concentration versus diversification, or sports teams and crypto.

Awash in liquidity

Thanks to several extraordinary decades of wealth creation, (present speed bumps aside) private foundations and their ultra-high-net-worth benefactors are flourishing.

Over the last thirty years the number of foundations has tripled from about 40,000 in 1995 with assets of $373.4 billion to nearly 120,000 holding $1.6 trillion today.

Given a record $19.4 trillion in liquid assets in checking and savings accounts and money market funds, an S&P annual return of 9.33% over the last thirty years, and unabated philanthropic zeal among the 225,000 U.S. ultra-wealthy mega-donors, private foundations – the Getty, Casey Family Programs, the Summer Science Program – continue to play a major role in American life.

Jon Hirtle, executive chairperson of OCIO provider Hirtle Callaghan puts it this way:

Foundations are responsible for a meaningful portion of society’s accumulated and monetized patrimony. That financial patrimony is used to enhance social services, the arts, scholarship, research…human progress, if you will.  So, better foundation investing means more human progress.  How about that for an inspiring mission?

Ornery, reclusive beasts

Too many people think investing is easy – Warren Buffett

Guest commentary: Jon Hirtle
Executive Chairman, Hirtle Callaghan

Most universities distribute about 4.5 to 5 percent of their endowment’s value each year to support school operations. The investment office therefore must earn a bare minimum 4.5 to 5 percent to maintain the nominal value of the endowment and its ability to support the university in perpetuity.

But what about purchasing power? Inflation whittles away at buying power or “real” value, so endowments add an inflation component to their earning targets. The average inflation rate since World War Two has been 3.65 percent, a cumulative price increase of 1,653.36%. So, 8 percent would seem to be the minimum return required.

But it’s not that simple. Schools have faced massive cost pressures for years. According to Mercer, “Over the past 40 years, the inflation rate in the US higher education space — as measured by the Commonfund Institute’s Higher Education Price IndexTM (HEPI) — has exceeded the headline inflation rate as measured by the Consumer Price Index (CPI) by almost 40% on a cumulative basis.”

Given this uncertainty, prudent endowment boards aim for returns that include some growth in the capital, at least another 1 percent a year on average to cover contingencies and development. All things considered – operating expenses, financial aid, growth, and the unexpected (Covid cost schools billions) – we think a 9 percent hurdle rate is a more realistic goal.

What to do?

Capital market theory assumes that “the greater the risk that an investment may lose money, the greater its potential for providing a substantial return. Setting aside the historically strong stock market returns over the last decade (and two bear markets in 2020 and 2022) , “since 1950, public stocks have, on average, produced about 6 percent over inflation with one major caveat, there’s lots of price volatility along the way. (Chart: S&P Historic Performance.)

Over that same time horizon, investment grade bonds have on average produced a scant 2 percent over inflation, albeit with far less volatility.

So why not hold 100 percent stock portfolios? The problem is the above-mentioned volatility. The stock market experiences dramatic price drops from time to time, destabilizing budgets and generally scaring the hell out of trustees.

How about adding bonds to dampen drawdowns? Not so fast. Investment grade bonds are indeed far less volatile, but with real returns of only 2 percent, not close to what institutions need.

The Capable, Independent Investment Office

Welcome to my world. How can we capture real endowment returns that exceed what is required while actively managing downside risk? Here’s how we look at it:

We source and select a myriad of compelling investments that complement each other by rising and falling in price at different times, then assemble them in a way that captures stock-market-like returns with something like bond market volatility.

This is no small task. It requires a team of experienced professionals collaborating closely and, ideally, working inside an independent investment office with substantial power.

Only the largest universities have the resources to support such an office. Most endowments and foundations do not. David Swensen described the choice as between “those that are set up to make high-quality active management decisions and those that aren’t.”

Governance Alpha

There is yet another challenge. When endowments fail to achieve their required return over time, the investment staff or the Investment Committee or both are accountable. “Alpha” is investment jargon for value added or subtracted by active investment decisions.

Governance Alpha is a term that we coined years ago to differentiate the impact of committee or CIO decisions from those made by underlying specialist money managers. Just like Manager Alpha, Governance Alpha can be either positive or negative.

When an endowment fails to earn its required return, it is most often the result of Governance Alpha, well-documented behavioral tendencies, present in all humans, which challenge retail investors and endowment committees alike.

For example, “Recency Bias” encourages committees to chase recent returns. Without a seasoned and savvy CIO with the power to check those tendencies, Governance Alpha often turns negative. That’s why a professional and independent investment operation is so important.

The OCIO solution

OCIO firms offer the proven performance of the best large institutional and family investment offices. And they have the resources, talent, structure, and process to deliver those required returns and cope with operational and regulatory burdens and the complexity of modern portfolios.

—Jon Hirtle

Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong — Howard Marks

Our latest fiscal year-end 2024 endowment performance report features ten-year and one-year returns, and AUM for one-hundred-forty-four US and eight Canadian institutions, the latest available.

In our line of work, acquiring talent and capabilities for institutional and family office clients, we like hard data on the individuals who drive the investment decisions.  Returns may be historical, but they are useful clues to an investor’s – and board’s – views, process, and discipline.

We consider a ten-year span to be a rigorous and revealing measure of the strength of an institution’s long-term investment abilities, but we remind our readers that there’s much more to the story.

Board members and administrators set the parameters for investment execution, and they are the ones to judge whether their goals are met.  Every school has its own endowment payout rate and tolerance for risk and that’s what CIOs aim for.  Some schools rely heavily on income, others place more weight on growing the principal.

A tale of two markets

For those institutions holding substantial U.S. public equity stakes life is sweet.  As Chris Markoch at MarketBeat writes, the S&P was up twenty-three percent in 2024, “driven by earnings growth and sector leaders in AI, biopharma, and blue-chip companies.”

Sometimes it’s best to run with the herd, to paraphrase our Mr. Marks.  But for endowments with heavy exposure to alts, particularly private equity, there were challenges.

PE has performed well for forty years.  But there are periods when the economy tanks, deals stagnate, and returns to investors slow to a trickle.

Here’s Peter Lynch’s droll take on fickle Mr. Market, and a few partisan comments on PE from Alisa Amarosa Wood and Chris Harrington, partners at KKR, and Ludovic Phalippou, professor of Financial Economics at Saïd Business School, University of Oxford.

Opposing pundits aside, we take comfort in the chart below, a cheerful visual we ran in September’s newsletter from MFS investment Management depicting the S&P’s bumps and grinds.

S&P 500 Index cumulative returns for 1-, 5-, and 10-year periods following end of bear market

Tenure and Turnover

What a difference a decade makes.  Only about a third of the CIOs in our FY2024 endowment investment report logged ten years or more tenure, and those are mostly the ones on top.

Mr. Philip Zecher, CIO at Michigan State University, and our featured guest below, will soon pass the ten year mark and the endowment’s splendid performance reflects his time and attention.

Chief investment officers new to the position, Ms. Geeta Kapadia at Fordham for example, barely have time to roll up their sleeves and grab a pitchfork.  It takes five years at least to clear, plough, and seed an endowment, and five more to fully bear fruit.

College endowments consist of thousands of gifts with strings and legally binding contracts attached.  To repeat a well-worn trope, it takes years to fully implement a multi-asset, multi-generational investment strategy and altering course mid-stream – a new investment chair, a change in CIOs, court battles – can sap performance for a decade.

————————————————–

Phil Zecher, chief investment officer

Michigan State University