NEPC’s Mike Manning & Steve Charlton have been featured in an article in Pensions & Investments for their insights on the OCIO industry and third-party evaluators. View excerpts below or read the full article on the Pensions & Investments site here.
For decades, investment consulting firms have maintained their perch as the prime gatekeepers of institutional portfolios, advising asset owners on manager selection, asset allocation and portfolio construction.
But with consultants, in their guise as outsourced CIOs, now almost universally bringing their own dogs to the money management fight, the question of who can gatekeep the gatekeepers is taking on growing relevance.
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The hope, said Michael P. Manning, managing partner of Boston-based investment consultant and OCIO firm NEPC, “is that they’re going to put us in front of organizations where there’s a good cultural or philosophical fit, as opposed to organizations … who just send out 20 RFPs,” without a deep understanding of how a firm such as NEPC works and its relative strengths.
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Steve Charlton, a partner and head of client solutions with NEPC, said with third-party evaluators now accounting for roughly a third of the OCIO searches NEPC responds to, the investment consultant — with $1.66 trillion in advisory assets as of June 30 and over $100 billion in OCIO mandates — is making “a concentrated effort” to engage with those firms, reflecting their rising profile as “the interface between the firm and the end client.”
Third-party evaluators ask a lot of challenging questions, Charlton noted, which in turn can result in a more robust process than searches that don’t involve those players. They are effectively helping clients do a better job fulfilling their fiduciary duty, he said.
Click here to read the full article on the Pensions & Investments site.