Former Morningstar Investment Management chief investment officer Matt Wacher will join JANA as its new CIO, leading the asset consultant’s overarching investment strategy and overseeing investment outcomes across all client segments and mandates. JANA’s last CIO, Steven Carew, left the asset consultant in 2021.

“JANA has a team with real depth across research, strategy and sustainability, and I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve built,” JANA CEO Georgina Dudley said in a statement.  

“As demand continues to broaden across our clients, the work is becoming more multi-dimensional as we support a wider range of client objectives and portfolio needs. A chief investment officer role strengthens investment leadership across our business and ensures we continue to deliver disciplined, long-term outcomes for our clients.”

Wacher will join the executive leadership team and take the reins across JANA’s investment research, investment strategy and sustainability functions when he starts on 19 May. At Morningstar, Wacher also served as chair of Morningstar’s global investment committee, overseeing investment methodologies and governance for $US15 billion ($21 billion) across diversified multi-asset strategies.

He has also held senior investment roles at Qantas Super, Russell Investments and CMC Markets.

“I’m excited to join JANA at a time when clients are placing an even greater emphasis on disciplined decision-making and consistent oversight,” Wacher said in a statement.

“JANA has built strong investment capability grounded in rigorous research and thoughtful portfolio construction. My focus will be to provide leadership across the investment function, build on the depth already in place, and ensure we continue delivering disciplined, long-term outcomes for clients.”

Wacher’s appointment comes as rival asset consultant Frontier Advisors prepares to bring its own OCIO solution to market, formed through the lift-out of State Super’s investment team.

That solution is aimed at small super funds as well as wealth managers and endowments, a space that JANA and other asset consultants have increasingly been targeting as the super funds that previously relied heavily on their advice – and ability to implement that advice – internalise many of their investment functions. JANA is the more established of the pair, having launched its implemented consulting/OCIO business way back in 2002, while Frontier still needs to lock in a custodian before it can start winning mandates.

“It’s still an advice-led independent service,” Frontier CEO Andrew Polson told Investment Magazine in October. “But where the client chooses not to operate their entire investment spectrum in house, we can support them.

“We think that’s a customer centric way of doing it… We want to disrupt the product and implemented consulting business out there, which we don’t believe really produces portfolios that are designed for those clients, and we see those examples all the time.

“What we see from a lot of OCIO solutions is that they have house product as a part of what they execute. ICIO [independent CIO] is an advice-led proposition that’s supplemented with our investment capabilities.”