JANA’s implemented consulting business has grown to $18.8 billion, powered by new mandate wins from insurers, universities and charities, just as rival Frontier Advisors readies a competing solution aimed at the very same clients. 

Leon Tisdell, JANA’s head of asset consulting and implemented consulting, told Investment Magazine that the growth of the business arm from around $11 billion in 2023 has been a mix of new client wins and appreciation of existing client assets. 

“There’s been a fair bit of new client wins, and it’s probably not a surprise that the segments that are interested in this type of model come from insurance clients, universities and other charities,” Tisdell said. 

The growth comes as new competition stirs in the market, with Frontier in the final stages of bringing out its own outsourced CIO solution built on the lift-out of State Super’s investment team and aimed at small super funds, wealth managers and endowments.

Frontier is yet to win a mandate but has been vocal about its ambitions, with chief executive Andrew Polson telling Investment Magazine in October that Frontier wants to disrupt existing implemented consulting businesses, which he said don’t produce “portfolios that are designed for those clients”. But Tisdell said that Frontier’s entry into the market “really doesn’t change [things]”.

“We’ve been doing this for 25 years. We’re a trusted partner to a range of institutional clients, and our focus is on what matters to those clients – generally, achieving their investment objectives, and particularly for implemented consulting, in a form that makes their life easy and administratively simple as well.” 

Still, JANA has been more vocal about the business of late and has recently appointed former Morningstar Investment Management Asia-Pacific chief investment officer Matt Wacher as its new chief investment officer. JANA’s last CIO, Steven Carew, left in 2021.   

Growing complexity

“It’s really hard in institutional investing – they do focus on different elements, and when you get an RFP, it’s not just a cookie cutter response at all,” Tisdell said. “It’s always very different.” 
 
The drivers of client uptake are similarly varied, but one common thread is an investment environment that has become markedly more complex – more asset classes, and more complicated ones – prompting institutions with small teams to reconsider how they are implementing their investment program.  

“The last few years, particularly in private markets and unlisted [assets] – implementing a program that’s diversified in some of those asset classes across managers, across geographies is not easy,” Tisdell said.  

“A lot of the private markets, you have to wait to be able to access and get opportunities. That has been a factor that clients, even the larger institutional clients, are finding quite challenging.” 

Pooled scale also gets smaller institutions into asset classes they might not be able to access on a standalone basis – unlisted infrastructure, for example, where manager minimums are prohibitively high – as well as offshore vehicles. 

But it’s not just the investment problem pushing institutions towards the model, Tisdell said. Smaller players are finding it harder to access services like custody as providers pull back from the bottom end of the domestic market – a dynamic that can cause a rethink of the whole investment model.  

“Custodians [are] pulling out of the domestic market or raising the minimums that they will have for certain clients,” Tisdell said. “Sometimes it can be a trigger for looking at the investment model, and again leading to structures like implemented consulting, where the custodian’s embedded in the structure.” 
 
JANA CIO Matt Wacher will appear at the Investment Magazine Fiduciary Investors Symposium, held in Healesville from 13-15 October. Eligible asset owners can register here.