Sona Menon, Head of North America Pensions, discusses the areas that are currently gaining the most traction within the OCIO space.

Key points from this interview include:

• Today, with portfolios becoming more and more sophisticated and complex, using more asset classes, using more alternative assets, a lot of institutions feel that they’d rather give it to a group of experts who can look at it and manage it on a closer or more daily basis, and that’s where an investment firm like Cambridge Associates can come in.
• We’ve been seeing quite a lot of interest coming from endowments and foundations who are looking to outsource their investment office, as well as from public and private pension plans, especially among corporate pensions.
• Those who do choose to do outsourced CIO choose it for several key reasons, one being that they may not have the time to oversee a portfolio the way that it needs to get overseen. They may not have the resources, whether it be on the staff side or the investment committee side, to oversee it. Or they may not have the expertise in-house to make the decisions that they feel are adequate.
• Our investment teams focus on finding the best-in-class managers across asset classes — e.g., all public equities strategies, fixed income, private equity, hedge funds — evaluating qualitative and quantitative aspects including but not limited to subject matter expertise, operational excellence, performance, compliance procedures, and fees and terms.

Watch the video and read the full transcript here.