Commonfund竞争吗？

公共纽伦德 - 基于康涅狄格州的外包店 - CIO店的事实没有隐藏 - 自从金融危机长期以来一年以来，在资产中被出现下降。

But newly minted CEO Mark Anson likes David-versus-Goliath battles.

Giant consulting firms have pushed into the OCIO industry, Anson says, for obvious reasons: They can charge more in fees. And they were already advising clients on investing, making it a natural progression to begin managing their assets.

“They’ve been the camel’s nose under the tent for a long period of time,” says Anson in a phone interview. “What they’ve decided to do is bring the whole camel under the tent, both one- and two-humped camels.”

Commonfund was founded in 1971 to help nonprofits manage their assets with modern investment strategies. Today the firm is well known inside the niche world in which it sits, but is relatively small, with $25.3 billion of assets at the end of June — a 7 percent decline from mid-2007, even as its business taking full discretion over clients’ portfolios grows.

“The OCIO space is fiercely competitive nowadays,” says Anson, who also serves as Commonfund’s chief investment officer. “There are many new entrants. And certainly, the consultants are the ones who tend to dominate.”

这industry’s global assets, managed on a fully or partially discretionary basis, have soared in recent years, with Cerulli Associates predicting they’ll swell to $2 trillion by 2020, and as much as $2.7 trillion by 2022. That’s based on the expectation that they’ll keep rising at a double-digit rate annually.

Anson指出Mercer，Aon，Willis Towers Watson，以及剑桥员工作为沉重的咨询公司，在过去十年中已经挖出了OCIO资产。他说，通过危机的客户营业额普遍促使这些公司审查他们的商业模式，然后按进入制度投资者的更多有利可图的管理投资组合市场。亚博赞助欧冠

Commonfund did some of its own self-examination three years ago under former CEO Catherine Keating, according to Anson, who joined the asset manager as CIO in January 2016. (He was previously president and investment chief at the family office of Texas billionaire Robert Bass, filling other executive roles in asset management before that, including CIO of the California Public Employees’ Retirement System, the largest pension fund in the U.S.)

After taking a hard look at its business, Commonfund decided to pivot to focus on its strengths: total portfolio construction and private capital. The firm understood the repositioning would initially result in a loss of assets, Anson recalls, but was willing to take the steps needed to sharpen its competitive edge.

这firm’s multiasset business — its largest more than a decade ago — has shrunk to the smallest. The unit, which consists of commingled multiasset and stock and bond funds, saw assets drop 79 percent to $2.8 billion at the end of June, from $13.6 billion in mid-2007, according to Anson.

解释这一衰落，他说，在多档市场中的新进入者特别高的新进入者的涌入之后，Commonfund在其资金中关闭了大约40％的资金，其中包括智能测试策略。

“我们愿意这样做，因为我们知道这个空间现在是非常有竞争力的，”Anson说，并补充说，该公司继续在该类别中提供更大的核心基金。“我们现在有一个更清晰的商业模式。”

Meanwhile, assets in Commonfund’s total portfolio construction unit — what it now thinks of as its OCIO business — have more than tripled over the past 11 years, to $13.4 billion at the end of June. The firm takes full discretion over clients’ portfolios in this area, or partial discretion for a majority of their assets.

Anson表示，大量的Communfund的MultiadSet客户已迁移到其OCIO业务，在那里他们仍然投资于该公司的集中资金，这些资金投入股票，债券和替代资产。

6月底，与2007年中期的98亿美元起，私人资本私营资本私营资本私营资本的资产下降7％至91亿美元。此处的公司为客户管理私人资本资产，他们可能同样与其他货币管理人员合作 - 所以这不一定是一个独家关系。

Anson says Commonfund emphasizes performance over asset growth in private capital.

“It’s a bit of a tug-of-war,” he explains. “We want to ensure we continue to produce great double-digit returns across all of our programs.”

Commonfund creates private capital portfolios for investors seeking exposure to areas such as private equity, venture capital, real estate, and private credit, according to Anson. He says the team also invests in the secondaries market, buying stakes in funds managed by private equity and venture capital firms.

“Our job is not to be the biggest,” says Anson. “The catch is, the really great private equity and venture capital managers out there are capacity-constrained.”

In the VC market, Anson sees a large dispersal in performance between the managers in the first and second quartiles. “It’s a very small group of the most successful ones, and you want to be with the very best in venture capital,” he says.

Within private equity, Anson contends that Commonfund could increase assets by committing more capital to funds overseen by large, high-profile firms. “But then we have to trade off the return performance, and we’re not willing to do that,” he notes. “We don’t have the pressure to grow like a public company or like a consulting firm.”

Instead, the firm generally prefers small to midmarket private equity managers that are adept at adding operational value. The average fund size in Commonfund’s private capital program is $500 million to $550 million, Anson says, drawing a contrast with firms that have more room for investors because they’re continually raising pools as large as $20 billion.

At least for now, Anson is sticking to the vision set by Keating, who left Commonfund at the end of June to become CEO of Bank of New York Mellon Corp.’s wealth management unit.

“我们有一个游戏计划，”他说。“现在它只是专注于我们所知道的我们需要做的事情。”

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Anson may make some tweaks along the way.

例如，他说，该公司正在花更多的时间从较大的客户到达较大客户的业务，同时继续使用较小的捐赠和基金会，监督低于2.5亿美元的较小捐赠和基金会。

Trinity College在宾夕法尼亚州莱灵斯堡的哈特福德，康涅狄格州和Bucknell University，是Commonfund的客户落入更大的范围。根据Anson的说法，Trinity今年成为一个客户，大约两年前的Commonfund聘请了Commonfund。

其他客户包括威廉·佩恩基金会- 通过投资艺术，教育和流域保护，支持大费城 - 以及自然土地管理中心;Western Washington University; and Rust College, a Holly Springs, Mississippi, school founded in 1866 for newly freed slaves, according to Commundfund’swebsite。

捐赠和基金会是公司的“面包和黄油”，说Anson说。“我们正在谈论更多的养老金计划，我怀疑我们也可能与更多的家庭办公室交谈。”

这influence of OCIO firms in the selection of asset managers has increased significantly: Ninety percent of fund managers polled by Cerulli last year had won a mandate through the industry, jumping from 33 percent in 2014.

缺乏内部资源,提高的愿望governance, and the need to increase risk-adjusted returns are the top reasons that investors have turned to OCIO providers for help, according to Michele Giuditta, a director in Cerulli’s institutional practice.

“The consultants have definitely had a lot of success,” she says, adding that they have consolidated to position themselves as leaders in the OCIO industry. For example, she notes, Towers Perrinmerged随着沃森维雅的2010年，威利斯集团于2016年在2016年购买了塔Watson，创造了威利斯塔沃森。

弗吉尼亚州的阿灵顿咨询公司三月宣布其OCIO资产有超过1000亿美元根据退休计划的强劲需求，寻求外包全部或部分投资管理责任。

这biggest OCIO providers today are Mercer, Russell Investments Group, Aon Hewitt Investment Consulting, Willis Towers Watson, and BlackRock, according to Giuditta. Compared with advising on asset management, she says, fees are generally higher when “taking discretion” for the investing decisions.

“We’ve seen an immense amount of growth in our OCIO business,” says Sona Menon, an outsourced–chief investment officer and head of North American pensions at Cambridge. There are endowments and foundations among its clients, she says, but the firm sees the strongest demand from corporate pension plans.

Cambridge will manage a client’s entire pool of assets, overseeing portfolios as small as $100 million or as large as $4 billion, according to Menon. The firm will also step in to manage part of a portfolio where there’s a dearth of expertise or ideas, a service more typically used by even larger clients.

“Where we’ve seen most of the interest has been for alternative assets,” says Menon, including private equity, venture capital, hedge funds, private credit, and real estate.

Commonfund, meanwhile, is examining ways to innovate within the firm’s portfolios.

“That’s where I’m spending a lot of time,” says Anson. “When we’re going up against the consultants, we have to fight their scale with innovation.”

As such, the firm has invented its own quartile ranking system for hedge fund managers.

“What makes us special in that regard is that there is no quartile ranking system for hedge funds,” says Anson. Institutional investors generally judge managers by benchmarking their performance against Hedge Fund Research’s HFRI index, which tracks the industry’s returns.

“Our goal is to drive the HFRI index all the way down into the bottom quartile compared to our managers,” says Anson. “We’ve now done that.”

当Commonfund从另一个外部经理接管对冲基金投资组合时，它倾向于发现分配在四类中同样传播：股票对冲，事件驱动，全球宏观和相对价值。目的是多元化，但这种标准化的方法可以导致“很多拥挤的交易”，“安森说。

“We can bring in any hedge fund manager regardless of their strategy, and we know how they fit in our portfolio,” he explains. “We’re quartile-ranking our managers against each other in our funds, so it’s hand-to-hand combat.”

Man Group’s GLG is a hedge fund manager that Commonfund likes. Anson, who declined to name others in the portfolio, says the firm invested in GLG’s global macro currency offering that was opened up to a very limited number of investors about two years ago.

Commonfund一直致力于降低公司对冲基金成本，旨在为管理费用零收费和30％的绩效。这是传统的2和20型号的扭曲。安森表示，Commonfund处于更强大的谈判地位，以实现这一目标，因为，在其重组下，该公司在其投资组合中减少了对冲基金管理人员的数量。

咨询公司有优势时,to lowering costs for their OCIO clients owing to their “great scale,” says Anson. “They can drive costs down to the bone,” he explains. “We have to be smarter, we have to be faster, we have to be more flexible. And we have to be able to find ways to find fee breaks.”

根据本地基金会和Commonfund Institute的年度调查，去年基金会的平均投资回报率约为15％的费用，从2013年开始生产最大的收益。这学习was based on responses from 224 foundations overseeing about $104 billion at the end of last year.

Anson declined to disclose Commonfund’s performance for clients, as the information is private.

Although Commonfund trails many of its rivals in the accumulation of assets, the CEO points to a Cogent report in May as evidence that the firm remains tops in the eyes of many institutional investors.

该报告显示，Commonfund在非营利组织中排名第2号，被问及哪个OCIO提供者他们最有可能推荐他们的机构在明年考虑。黑石那the world’s largest asset manager, with $6.3 trillion of total assets, won out.

Happy to share those findings over email, Anson would not utter on the phone the name of the firm that beat Commonfund.

“你可以在报告中看到谁排名第一，”他说。“与我们的大卫相比，他们是一个巨人。”