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Outsourced Chief Investment Officer (OCIO) services

Today’s institutions face far more complex markets than they have in the past, making it difficult to focus on core missions. Through the breadth of our platform, BlackRock’s OCIO services can help alleviate day-to-day burdens and promote cost savings for our clients so they can better meet their objectives.

How OCIO services can add value to institutions

Outsourced Chief Investment Officers, or OCIOs, are third-party solutions providers who aim to serve as an extension of the client asset owner’s team.

Each client’s unique objectives and challenges may dictate why they seek OCIO services. 
Here are examples of why institutions are turning to OCIO:

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Creating nimble portfolios
Complex markets require nimble portfolios but reacting daily is challenging due to governance constraints. OCIO relationships help enable active responses and flexibility.
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Alternatives access
Private markets have become core to institutional portfolios but require heavy due diligence and resources. OCIOs can offer access to managers, deal sourcing and monitoring.
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Cost-effective collaboration
OCIOs potentially serve as an extension of staff, freeing up resources for organizations’ core priorities. They also leverage their economies of scale to save clients' money.
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Risk management and compliance
OCIO providers typically have robust risk management and compliance frameworks in place to aid in adherence to regulatory requirements and best practices.

How BlackRock helps institutions with OCIO services

Asset owners have entrusted BlackRock with more than $300 billion in OCIO mandates globally.1 The breadth of our investment and technology platforms helps us offer cost-efficient solutions to clients, act as an extension of an institution’s staff, better access top-performing alternatives managers and navigate volatile markets through built-in agility.

BlackRock’s OCIO business sits at the heart of our firm’s mission to help more people experience financial well-being. Our OCIO clients come to us for mission alignment so they can better deliver and focus on their beneficiaries, communities and core objectives.

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Dedicated client service

Our client CIOs specialize in specific client types from pensions, family offices, foundations, endowments, healthcare and others to create tailored portfolios to address individual client needs.

Broad investment toolkit

OCIO clients can tap into a full toolkit of investment capabilities: active, indexfactors and alternatives and dedicated manager research to help achieve better investment outcomes.

Technology powered

Using our Aladdin® technology, we monitor portfolios real-time with an outcome lens to navigate the impact of markets and make more informed and timely investment decisions.

Scale and efficiency

Our platform is an industry leader, providing scale across asset management and technology, promoting access to key external managers, reduced fees as well as intelligence on trends and flows.

Awards & recognition

Industry Innovation Award – Asset Management & Servicing OCIO

BlackRock was named the winner of the Excellence in Asset Management and Servicing OCIO category at the 2023 CIO Industry Innovation Awards.
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Endowments and foundations

We leverage our investment expertise and proprietary technology platform, Aladdin®, to provide portfolio options that help endowments and foundations meet their objectives and fulfill their organization's mission over the long-term. 

Our OCIO services for endowments and foundations: 

  • Incorporates 'best practices' for nonprofit governance
  • Offers a performance accountable approach
  • Provides access to top private market managers
  • Leverages industry-leading risk management tools 
  • Includes dedicated nonprofit expertise and education 
Ned Rosenman
Managing Director, Head of OCIO for Endowments and Foundations
Edward Ng, CFA
Chief Investment Officer, Endowments, Foundations and Healthcare

Corporate and public pensions

BlackRock’s OCIO team is steeped in experience servicing corporate and public pensions with their defined benefit plans. Our in-house investment experts, actuaries and client-relationship managers offer solutions that help provide for an institution’s retirees.

Our OCIO services for pensions include:

  • liability-driven investing platform within a global fixed-income business
  • Tailored portfolios designed to help improve or preserve funded-status levels
  • Designing a customized alternatives portfolio in a lower-cost, accessible way
Andrew Citron
Director, Head of OCIO for Pensions
Gabriella Barschdorff
Co-Head of Americas Pensions group within Multi-Asset Strategies & Solutions (MASS)
Martin Jaugietis
Co-Head of Americas Pensions group within Multi-Asset Strategies & Solutions (MASS)

Healthcare

The pandemic underscored the importance of healthcare and hospital systems to our communities, while significantly disrupting their operations. BlackRock can collaborate with healthcare providers to help them oversee their varied asset pools.

Our OCIO services for healthcare include:

  • Developing an investment playbook that takes into account a client’s liquidity needs and risk profiles
  • Advice on addressing investment performance while managing rising operating and labor costs
  • Making strategic investments across public and private markets
Anne Marie Schultz
Head of U.S. and Canada Healthcare Business
Edward Ng, CFA
Chief Investment Officer, Endowments, Foundations and Healthcare

Family offices

Family offices today face increasingly complex responsibilities and often resource constraints. Turning to an outsourced investment team can help manage investments from generation to generation.

Our OCIO services for families include:

  • Bespoke asset allocation and wide-ranging advice to meet each family’s unique objectives
  • Cost-effective and tax-efficient access to broad investment strategies and resources
  • Access to a diversified private markets program
Seema Ackerman
Managing Director, Head of OCIO for Family Offices
Alan McKenzie
Chief Investment Officer for Family Offices

Contact your dedicated OCIO team

Get in touch to learn more about how our OCIO services can help alleviate operational burden and expand investment capabilities for your business.
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Common questions from clients

  • Outsourced Chief Investment Officer, or OCIO, is when an asset owner “outsources” some or all portfolio-management decisions to a third-party investment partner.

  • The OCIO provider takes on fiduciary responsibility, and often ownership of certain operational services. However, importantly, the asset owner continues to retain full authority over asset allocation, as well as risk and return objectives.

  • Institutional investors that range from corporate pensions, public pensions, endowments, foundations, healthcare systems to family offices have relied on OCIO to address specific objectives and constraints. 

    While in the past OCIO was seen as a service sought by smaller entities, larger pools of money are increasingly turning to OCIO today.

  • Today’s investors may need expertise across a broader, more complex range of asset classes to generate the returns needed. This may mean leaning further into riskier asset classes like alternatives, which require more oversight, but also being nimble in portfolio changes to manage risk or take advantage of dislocations.

    Then there’s the challenge of getting access to the right managers and markets. An OCIO provider with experience and scale can help clients gain entry into investments that may not have been accessible independently. By taking the whole portfolio into account, we seek to align the strategic asset allocation with the tactical, generate better access and fees, as well as more efficient trading.

    The governance models of some clients also often prevent them from getting timely data and making quick decisions. BlackRock’s technology is one of the few systems in the industry where every phase of the investment process is captured in one ecosystem using real-time data. We believe this reduces operational risk, leading to better outcomes.

  • Investing—constructing a well-diversified portfolio, setting the strategic asset allocation, minimizing volatility—is the heartbeat of OCIO. We help investors who are seeking the best investment managers across the globe.

    Our clients get access to the size and scale of our platform, which includes 400+ approved strategies, analytics powered by the Aladdin® platform and BlackRock-exclusive share classes and negotiated terms with third-party managers. BlackRock’s robust open-architecture framework for investments is supported by 150+ firmwide manager researchers globally and a rigorous process to select, blend and de-select active managers.2

    Asset owners are also placing increasing value on the “O,” the outsourced services. This can involve managing stakeholders, handling regulatory requirements, and streamlining analytics and reporting. The complexity and time required for these tasks, as well as the technology and costs, have become more and more burdensome for institutions. Having a skilled partner can free up time and resources for clients.

  • One of the biggest benefits of having an OCIO partner is timeliness. Most asset owners don't make investment decisions until they meet with their investment committees, trustees, and consultants—meetings that typically only occur quarterly.

    These groups then often rely on stale data to adjust portfolios—a problem given today’s volatile and complex financial markets.

    With OCIO partnerships, the delegated third-party firm monitors investments daily and has the authority to make necessary portfolio changes in real-time. This enhances clarity around the governance, making it clear which stakeholders are responsible for what.

Contact our dedicated OCIO team

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