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Charles Skorina & Company

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

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News & Research for Institutional Investors

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Director of investments for $2.5bn endowment

INTERVIEWS

Vicki Fuller xCIO NY State Common Ret. Fund

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

Letitia Johnson, new CIO at Amherst

2006-2019 Cambridge Assoc., MBA Yale, BA Brown

Joe Cullen, new CIO at Penn State University

Mr. Cullen joins investment office Sept 2019. 4yrs as CIO at Montana Board of Investments, x Fidelity, x Amherst, x Lucent. MBA Carnegie Mellon, BA Ripon College.

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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

OCIO Growth in 2019: The Party’s Over

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

Performance & Persistence: 1-10 year Endowment Returns

Our FY2019 institutional investment update presents the latest one and ten-year returns for sixty endowments.

We consider ten-year returns to be a rigorous and revealing measure of the strength of an institution’s oversight and investment abilities.

Despite rumblings to the contrary, our latest research shows that many nonprofit chief investment officers – and their boards – deliver meaningful value to their institutions.

The road to riches

Most high-performance investment offices on our list have stable boards and long serving CIOs.

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? – can sap performance for a decade.

We recruit these executives for a living and avidly follow all institutional investment heads managing assets over $1 billion (and many with less), tracking their performance and scrutinizing their abilities.

They may have a down year or two but, as we spotlighted in an earlier report, top chief investment officers stay on top.

And now, on to the table for our fresh-from-the-oven, pre-Thanksgiving performance chart!

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.

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