Investment Management Operations Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert

Darshan Desai is the COO and Head of Risk at Beach Point Capital, a $15 billion credit shop based in Santa Monica, CA.

Darshan and I discuss his career path, which began at York Capital, his move to Kansas City to works for BATS, and then finding his way to Beach Point in 2010. Darshan shares his experience and learnings from seeing two firms ramp up assets and people.

I was curious to speak to Darshan as he is also the Head of Risk, making for a unique opportunity to talk about data/analytics, how to be a risk-oriented COO, and why they outsourced their entire middle office.

We close with the importance of IQ and EQ when building teams and how Covid changed the way he manages others.

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Amy Knapp is the COO of Corsair Capital, a private equity firm that is focused on buyouts and infrastructure.   
 
When we started the podcast, the goal was to share best practices among investment operations professionals, and my conversation with Amy fires on all cylinders.
 
Amy discusses her career path from public accounting to an unexpected opportunity to be a CFO early in her career, eventually becoming the COO.
 
We then cover an array of topics from the operational challenges with having multiple strategies, a deep dive on ESG/DEI, and how to make the shift from being a controller to a strategic CFO/COO. The team at Corsair practices what they preach, so there are some great take-aways. 

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This Sponsored Insight highlights Nasdaq’s Solovis, a multi-asset class portfolio, data, and risk management system for asset owners.

We spoke with Jeff Manning of Verger Capital Management, a $2.8 billion OCIO that was created out of the Wake Forest University Office of Investments. Verger’s CIO, Jim Dunn, was an early guest on Capital Allocators, and that conversation is replayed in the feed.

Jeff oversees all financial operations at Verger including the team, reporting, and strategic decisions. He provides a detailed case study on how Verger enhanced its operational capabilities as it scaled and how a partnership with Solovis helped drive efficiency.

We are grateful for Nasdaq Solovis’s sponsorship of Investment Management Operations and are eager to highlight their contributions to the asset owner community.

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Jim Dunn is the CEO and CIO of Verger Capital Management, an Outsourced CIO business whose anchor client is Wake Forest University. Prior to forming Verger, he served as CIO of Wake Forest for five years. That transition from a sole client to an OCIO business, is a fascinating part of our conversation. Before joining Wake, Jim traveled the world as CIO of Wilshire Associates, where among other things he experienced the best story of a manager getting their foot in the door that I’ve ever heard. He got his start in the business trading death spiral convertible bonds at a now defunct hedge fund and got introduced to manager selection at Investorforce.

Our conversation starts with Jim’s career path, and covers a full range issues in allocating capital. We discuss defining risk tolerance, a factor-based approach to asset allocation, separating talent from luck in manager selection, the politics of endowment management, challenges using internal management, and culture. If you listen carefully, you’ll hear a few one-liners. Jim is chock full of gems and life lessons.

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Karl Sprules is the COO at Alliance Bernstein, a global asset manager with $725 billion in assets and over 4,700 employees. 
 
I really enjoyed speaking with Karl as he shows how you can be nimble at scale. We cover a lot of territory from his beginnings at Alliance Capital in the technology group, navigating the merger that created AB, and his evolution into the COO seat.  
 
Karl shares how AB has evolved over time and the rationale behind the bold decision to move their headquarters from Manhattan to Nashville creating a new investment management hub and recalibrating work life balance for many people. We then turned to how AB is expanding into Asia, India, and their current thoughts on AI.

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Mike Lukasek is a Managing Director and the COO for the University of Pennsylvania’s Office of Investments.
 
Mike has been the COO of Penn’s Endowment for over 14 years. Prior to that, he was a VP at Goldman Sachs for their private equity fund of funds business and a VP of Finance at Summit Partners.
 
Given his tenure at Penn, Mike brings perspective on the evolution of an endowment office. He talks about how Penn’s operations and technology has evolved overtime and shares his insights on what is coming down the road. We talk about how to assess what you have versus what you really need, common triggers for change, the future of fund admins and custody banks and the changing role of investment data. 
 
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