Home - Charles Skorina & Company Charles Skorina & Company

Charles Skorina & Company

● RETAINED EXECUTIVE SEARCH ●

Our Clients: Boards & Trustees, C-suite Executives, Family Offices
Our Services: we recruit board members, chief investment officers, senior asset managers

Michael D. Pia, new CIO at $1.9bn Texas A&M Fdn

Mr. Pia recruited from TRS Tx (13yrs), x Lockheed Martin, x US Marine Corp 11yrs, MBA Tx Christian, MS U West Florida, BS US Naval Academy

John D. Skjervem, new CEO at Alan Biller & Assocs. ($100bn total, $60bn OCIO)

Mr. Skjervem, CIO & Director Inv Div $111bn Oregon State Treasury moves to ABs Menlo Park, CA office in April. xEVP & CIO Northern Trust wealth division, MBA U Chicago, BA UC Santa Barbara

Tilly Franklin, new CIO at $3.9bn U Cambridge endowment

Cambridge board member, x PE head at family office Alta Advisers, x Apax Partners, x BBC Americas. MA London Bus School, Harvard Kennedy Scholar, MA U Cambridge, Westminster School

Anastasia Titarchuk, promoted to CIO at $216bn NY State Common Ret. Fund

Ms. Titarchuk promoted from dep CIO, 8yrs NY Common, x BofA, Barclays, JPMorgan, BS Yale

__________________________________

SKORINA IN THE NEWS

9-27-19 The Boston Globe: Harvard endowment underwhelms again

8-9-19 Bloomberg News: Yale’s David Swensen and His Alums Are Among Best-Paid Endowment Heads

5-7-19 Institutional Investor: Fight Over Pay Erupts at New Mexico’s Pension Fund men

5-7-19 Pensions & Investments: Endowments led by women outperform those led by men

5-7-19 Institutional Allocator: Shortfall in Women CIOs at Endowments is Mysterious

The OCIO Dilemma: Buy, Sell, or Merge

Active management is feeling more love these days. With the surge in institutions looking for investment help, there is new-found affection for the experience, judgement, and human touch provided by outsourced CIO firms.

But with opportunity pounding on the door, why do so few OCIOs hunger for growth? Where's that entrepreneurial drive, that vision, passion, and focus on becoming the biggest and the best?

We have been tracking the industry for over a decade and have yet to see a single independent OCIO provider break through the one-hundred billion AUM level. Not one. Most will never reach twenty billion.

The OCIO business, as defined by Commonfund is...the practice of delegating a significant portion of the investment office function to a third-party provider, typically an investment management or consulting firm.

The industry, with $2.38 trillion in assets as of our latest report, is bifurcated, highly diverse, intensely competitive, and the largest six providers on our annual OCIO list - Aon, Blackrock, Goldman Sachs, Mercer, Russell and Willis Towers Watson - with their size and resources dominate the largest segment, corporate pensions.

In this segment, reality bites. There are only about three-hundred remaining internally managed corporate pensions over a billion AUM and those that outsource will chose one of the big six mentioned above or a major insurance company. Boutique OCIOs have no chance for the business.

Most new prospects dwell in the sub-$1 billion realm - endowments, foundations, health systems, charities, and associations - and smaller sub-$200 million customers including ultra-high-net-worth families and nonprofits.

The good news is that there are about fifteen hundred colleges and universities in the US (about one-hundred-fifty endowments over $1 billion and another one-hundred-fifty in the $500 million to $1 billion bracket) and several thousand foundations, health systems, charities, and associations.

The bad news is that most of the eighty-three firms on our list compete in this space along-side RIAs, brokers, and advisors. Literally hundreds of rivals.

Most of these competitors would be much better off buying, selling, or merging with other providers instead of grinding away with little gain.

Here's why.

Pay and Chief Investment Officers: Seven Figures and Climbing

Back in November we reported on endowment performance for 60 schools for fiscal year 2019. Very shortly we will be back with our expanded 2019 performance report for the Top 100 CIOs by 5-year returns, our favorite metric. Please watch for it.

In this letter, we focus on how much institutions pay these excellent investment pros.

Why is compensation reported for CY2017 while assets are reported for FY2019?

Most of our compensation numbers are publicly available as long as you are willing to dig for them. Private schools and some publics disclose them in IRS filings. The hitch is the long time-lag - more than two years - before the data is publicly available.

The AUM numbers, on the other hand, are for FY2019. In each case we use the latest data available.

Filers report compensation for the latest complete calendar year within the fiscal year, which, in this case, is calendar year 2017. This lag is annoying but unavoidable given current IRS policy.

This is why our June 2020 compensation survey is based on calendar year end 2017 salaries, mostly sourced from federal tax filings (IRS Form 990) for FY2018.

The corresponding data for many public schools (those without parallel foundations) is often fresher, but it's scattered among various and often quirky databases in various jurisdictions with various disclosure rules.

It's ironic that data for public colleges has sometimes been the least public. But that's changed somewhat in recent years as more states adopt sunshine laws for public-employee pay generally. Or, you can file a FOIA request. But it's been like pulling teeth in many places.

Be that as it may, our pay figures should provide a useful frame of reference for boards, CEOs, and CIOs as they grapple with compensation challenges.

When it comes to pay, size matters

Our comp curve is very steep. The median pay for the 100 CIOs on our list is only about $643 thousand. That's much less than the mean, which indicates a lop-sided distribution with a few high-earners supporting the almost-$1 million average.

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.

Download vCard

Contact