Presidio Group Expands Advisory Service To Endowments, Foundations

Harriet Davies

4 April 2012

The Presidio Group has launched an investment advisory service for endowments and foundations, led by Peter Stein, who is joining the firm from Pacific Alternative Asset Management Company.

Before joining Pacific, Stein was chief investment officer for the University of Chicago between 2005 and 2009, and managing director of the Princeton University Investment Company before that, from 2000-2005.

“The Presidio Group pursues an endowment approach to investing for our clients, who are principally wealthy families and individuals,” said Mark Palmer, managing director and head of the firm’s capital advisors unit. “Offering endowment investing to endowment funds is a natural, logical extension of our capabilities.”

Presidio Group has around $4 billion in client assets, and runs investment banking, private equity, and capital advisory units through its offices in San Francisco, CA, Dallas, TX and Chicago, IL.

The firm is not the only wealth manager to have expanded its services in this way this year. In March Threshold Group, a multi-family office, launched an investment advisory program from private family foundations which seeks to integrate the philanthropic and investment sides, as well as deal with the family dynamics issues that affect boards.

According to a poll that came out in February from SEI, nearly half of executives and investment committee members overseeing US nonprofit endowments would consider outsourcing the investment management function.

The appeal of outsourcing investment management in this sector is being driven by limitations to time and resources, said Kevin Matthews, a managing director at SEI’s solutions team, as it frees executives up to concentrate on strategic investment and organizational finance decisions.

In terms of what nonprofit endowments are looking for, the SEI poll found that when asked to rank investment statements in terms of their priority to the organization, executives’ top priority was finding ways to best make asset allocation decisions in conjunction with organizational finance decisions.

The number two priority was making asset allocation changes to focus on downside risk protection, while this was followed by attempting to decrease volatility through the introduction of new asset classes to the portfolio.