By Johara Farhadieh
Chief Investment Officer (CIO)
It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nearly a year since I joined Wespath as the incoming chief investment officer (CIO), and I’ve now been CIO for over a month. Time flies! In that time, I’ve had the great privilege to meet so many of our institutional investors and participants—and learn how your investments with Wespath make a difference in your lives and people’s lives all around the world.
One of the reasons I was so excited to join Wespath was the opportunity to build on the strong foundation that had been established. For instance, we support our institutional investors with industry-leading client service. Going forward, I want to prioritize providing our institutional investors what they want and what they need to be successful in their missions. For our participants, I want to help them feel more confident about retirement.
In my new role, I think it’s important I explain these priorities—and provide the opportunity for you to get to know me a little better. There are a few phrases I use often, and I thought it might be helpful if I went into a little more detail about what I mean. These concepts help explain not only who I am as an investor, but who I am as a person.
That’s the idea behind this blog post and two additional blogs planned for the coming weeks. I also filmed a video to go along with each blog.
The phrase you will likely hear me say most often is “investment excellence.” As in, at Wespath, we provide investment excellence. For an asset allocator like Wespath, the primary way we provide investment excellence is to hire and provide access to the best asset managers. Our asset managers make the buy, sell and hold decisions on the stocks, bonds and other securities in our funds—so it’s critical that we get it right and work with the best.
It is our job at Wespath to establish guidelines for our asset managers, and then monitor, scrutinize and conduct research on the work they do. And then terminate an asset manager if it is not delivering as expected. We also must foster relationships with other asset managers, so we maintain a deep bench of potential replacements in the event we terminate an existing asset manager or seek a new type of investment strategy for our funds.
Another important consideration here is fees. Any good asset manager makes sure it is paid accordingly, but it is our job at Wespath to ensure that we pay fees for value. That doesn’t mean paying the lowest fees. But it does mean that the asset managers we hire are incentivized accordingly to add value for our investors. Since I started, we have negotiated reduced management fees that I’m confident will reduce costs for our investors—just as I did at my previous job.
In the below video, I spoke with my colleague Ryan Nilsson from our communications team about the critical role asset managers, fees and Wespath staff play in providing you investment excellence:
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