Frontier Advisors is preparing to roll out what it calls its “independent CIO” offering in Q4 having secured an “institutional-grade” custodian and firmed up the business’ growth plans for the next decade. Announced in October 2025, the new offering saw Frontier lift out State Super’s investment team and CIO, Charles Wu.  
 
“A lot of our existing staff have seen the limitations of advice-only models for a long time, and we’ve seen clients who we just haven’t been able to service because they haven’t had the middle- and back-office capabilities,” Frontier Advisors CEO Andrew Polson tells Investment Magazine.  
 
“We’re really excited about the opportunity to bring those components together.” 
 
State Super will be sticking with J.P. Morgan for its custody needs, but while Frontier was “keen” for J.P. to service its new business it was unable to secure their services due in part to size considerations. For “client two and beyond”, Frontier is instead implementing a wholesale managed discretionary account structure with a sub-custodian.  
 
“It gives us a much more flexible middle- and back-office structure to be able to deal with all of their requirements, and makes it really scalable for us,” Polson says. “For them, it essentially means everything’s in their name and they can walk away with that structure at the end of the day if for whatever reason they fall out of love with us as their adviser and ICIO.  
 
“It would operate in a very similar way to what we’re doing for [State Super] except for us having a separate custodian.” 
 
Frontier has identified “north of 20 targets” ranging from $250 million to $1 billion it wants to shop its ICIO solution to, but is currently in a period of “hyper-care” with State Super that it hopes will help it iron out any bugs before it gets to client two. Polson says Frontier doesn’t need to put a lot of extra business infrastructure in place and that it already has the distribution staff to take the solution to market, but expects that Frontier will add 60 people over the next decade if the business grows in line with its forecasts.  
 
“We’ve had many, many periods of scaling up ahead of opportunities and then having to take a deep breath and wait. We were about 85 before the STC staff joined, we’ve been up as high as 94 and we’ve vacillated between that as we’ve thought about new clients coming in and super funds rolling off,” Polson says. 
 
“We don’t need to invest heavily in a new sales force immediately but will build that up as we go.”  
 
Still, it’s a big step for a business that has traditionally only provided advice on investments and manager selection – and Polson is alive to the risk that its new offering might not find clients.  
 
“There is always a risk in every business endeavour, right?” Polson says. “We have a –five-year window to make it work. We don’t think that’s an unreasonable framework to work within and I think that gives us an enormous amount of flexibility in terms of what we’ve got to do.  
 
“The work we’ve done prior to entering the market and the prospects we’ve seen has given us a significant amount of comfort that this sort if service would be highly desirable to a range of players out there.  
 
“Those clients that we haven’t been able to win have often been the ones where we just didn’t have the ability to take that advice and turn it into a portfolio for clients and administer it and manage the risks for them.” 
 
Frontier has largely lost those clients to Mercer, JANA and WTW, but Polson now anticipates that the business will be able win a couple of new clients every year, and hopefully at least one in its first full year of operation.  
 
“If we do that, that’s an extremely healthy business for us. And that’s not a bend the bar issue. That’s quite do-able. If we do that, in five years’ time we’ve got a very profitable business. In a decade we’ve got something that’s worth a lot of money. We’d be in really great shape here in Australia, and we want to keep building this business in the region as well.”