Asset Owners

“They have quietly become the most important organizations in the world, and I don't put a caveat on that one. They are the cornerstone of our modern social welfare state. They are integrated into so much policymaking from Saudi Arabia to United States to Austr…”

“I don't love that framing. I love thinking about how technology unlocks additional basis points of return. It gives permission to pension funds to spend more money. Especially on the initial setup cost of getting your data right.”

“If you're an asset owner, it's pretty hard to be customer-centric, because your job is like, fill the asset, or you don't make money.”

“Fortunately or otherwise, when you're an asset owner, most people you speak to either work for you, and so it's always hard to know if they're really telling you what they think, or want a mandate off you. And so usually they agree with you wholeheartedly. I'm…”

“So that's a 120 trillion dollars in capital that kind of exists in this opaque world to the broader community of Researchers, but also people that just are operating in the financial services industry.”

“In the scheme of things, the truth is it doesn't matter because the scale of capital required is so great that unless you're being influential in either influencing or enabling other asset owners to invest in that way, then you're probably not fulfilling the m…”

“Accounting books and custody books are not really fit for purpose for making investment decisions, and so they're meant to be monthly, they're meant to be settlement date based, and as asset owners and allocators started making more investment decisions in-hou…”

“Asset owners are not trying to reverse engineer portfolios or front run your trades. They're really just trying to understand their exposure and understand their risk”

“The information asymmetry, as well as the experience asymmetry, our expertise asymmetry, we really cannot make the effective monitoring of asset managers, because they are much more sophisticated, much more informed.”

“Because the asset owner, we always talk about our entitlement as the owner. But on the other hand, we usually very, very lack time to talk about our responsibility as the owner.”

“And we think actually, as time goes on, and by time we mean couple of years, not decades, that all investors, all asset owners will be required, will require of us, and probably their own stakeholders will require that their investment performance be based upo…”

“If we target the asset owners, if we regulate the asset owners, and we say, you have to consider ESG consideration, As part of your fiduciary duty or some version of that, then the asset owners push the asset managers and the asset managers push the companies …”

“I've just noticed, and I would say maybe in the last three or four months, more of a willingness for mainstream asset owners to consider the case of divestment over some period of time from the oil and gas industry in particular, and that's the change too, and…”

“I think the ultimate goal would be to have, let's say, 10 to 12 asset owners be part of this. Beyond that, I think we start to get diseconomies of scale, and it's harder to share information.”

“Asset owner base has a generational timeframe. Most of them are cashflow positive through 20, 60, 20, 70.”

“It's famous that asset owners have eyes that are bigger than their stomachs when it comes to co-invest. They just can't move at the pace that these deals move and get things done in two weeks.”

“Our allies, the people we spend the most time with, are asset owners, even more than asset managers, who are absolutely left out of the roadshow process, the IPO. I mean, I, the people we talk to, who I think are the best investors on the planet, the most long…”

“That said, I will say one of the main lessons I learned from that time is that your risk tolerance has to be the lesser of my risk tolerance in time horizon or the asset owners.”

“We want a fair sharing of the alpha, meaning we think asset owners should get 65 to 75% of the alpha, at least, and that it's fine for the manager to have 20 or 30%.”

“You always want to work with asset owners because you're speaking to people whose money it is, who have final say. The asset allocators, it's not their money. They're investing it for someone else. So they're vulnerable to what that end investor's thinking.”

“If you could take the fees that were being paid to external managers and present them back to the board alongside the internal budgets that were being paid to staff, the inevitable question time and time again that came out of the mouths of the board members w…”

“No asset manager thinks they're bad at client service, but when you pull asset owners, and we have formally pulled them, 80% of asset managers have poor client service.”