Round-table excerpt: Market prime driver of foundation's decision
By Pensions & Investments | July 11, 2011
In this excerpt from Pensions & Investments' investment outsourcing round table, George K. Mateyo II, senior director of investments, Cleveland Clinic Foundation, discusses why Cleveland Clinic decided to outsource and how staff and committee members work with its outsourcer, Strategic Investment Group, Arlington, Va.
For us, it was probably the experience of the market over the last 10 or so years that drove (the decision to outsource).
Complementing: George K. Mateyo II said he and his team work ‘in tandem’ with the outsourcer.
It was committee members not really wanting to entertain the beauty contest of interviewing managers all the time and realizing that was a pretty ineffective approach to picking managers — where you spend 15, 20 minutes really interviewing a manager that you're about to award X millions of dollars to. Did it really lead to the best outcomes?
I think there were some discussions around the idea of building in-house vs. hiring a third-party firm, and the cost involved with actually building out a team of 15, 20 people ... and what that meant.
And I think more than anything ... just recognizing the linkage between the investment portfolio and the balance sheet has become so critical, to our institution anyway, that we felt we needed to put significant resources on it and make sure we managed it appropriately.
My role is kind of new in the sense that it was added alongside the fact that an outsourced firm was hired. We wanted some internal redundancies to some extent, where our office internally is running somewhat parallel with the outsourcer and involved in certain reviews of managers, tactical decisions for example.
We like to give the outsourcer a fair amount of discretion; we don't like to obstruct their process. But we like to be an advocate — and be a real internal set of eyes, if you will — for the institution, while also working in tandem with the outsourcer on things. So it's a bit of a hybrid to some extent, but that's how it's been set up and those are some of the drivers that got us into that position.
Prior to us retaining an outsourcer, we used a traditional consultant. We didn't make the switch because we were concerned about conflicts. It was more because of ... efficiency of decision making; having an adviser really advising, rather than making recommendations to the committee, was a big thing for us.
Clearly we didn't want to take on unnecessary conflicts. We were very careful not to retain a firm that had proprietary products ... We directed our outsourcer (by saying): To the extent that you do have the fund-of-funds approach, we really don't want any part of that. If there is a recommendation for that, our internal staff vets that very thoroughly and decides the cost benefit of doing that.
We have, for example, a smaller asset pool within the Cleveland Clinic whereby that structure makes a little sense ... (in that) it's a smaller amount. We still want exposure to alternatives. But to hire or to build a portfolio of hedge funds, for example, with a total portfolio in the $10 (million) or $20 million range, for example, ... it's hard to do that on a separate-account basis. So we're thinking about structures like that where it might make sense, but at the same time, being very conscious of the fees involved, who gets paid what.
We were pretty emphatic about no conflicts right off the fence, but the decision was really driven more by process, and understanding the subtleties within the outsourcing arena as to how to find a manager that really fit with us. You know — what are their processes? What do they emphasize?
We talked a lot about managers that focused just on manager access, for example, vs. portfolio structuring, and a lot of other qualitative factors, too.
We wanted the outsourcer and internal staff to have flexibility to react to market environments and make tactical decisions — rebalancing, for example, without having to wait for another committee meeting to go back and take 2% out of domestic equities ... or something like that.
