Intro
Uma Kolluri, who leads the investment services practice at search and evaluation consultant Curcio Webb, explains how OCIO searches are actually run — who is hiring, how a shortlist gets built, and why the industry's asset and performance data still will not line up apples to apples. Ravi Venkatraman presses her on fee compression, mega-plan mandates, composite benchmarking and what AI has and has not changed.
Guest: Uma Kolluri, principal and owner at Curcio Webb, where she leads the investment services practice
Host: Ravi Venkatraman, co-founder of the Investment Solutions Institute
Published: 28 August 2026 on The Solutions Scoop
Watch on YouTube | 56 min
Key Takeaways
Mega plans that ran money in-house for decades are outsourcing, and the trigger is cost
Kolluri on the first one her firm ran: "literally the moment the fees came in for the outsource model, it was almost like a no-brainer"
Fee compression has taken cost off the table as an objection
One provider told a search it was indifferent to the model chosen because its fee would be the same either way
Delegating to an OCIO does not move the fiduciary duty
Committees ask whether they are handing over the keys of the car; the answer is that they remain ultimately responsible
Private markets are now a leading reason institutions outsource
The specialist research, resourcing and implementation is the part committees do not want to build
Nobody agrees what counts as OCIO assets
Fully outsourced, hybrid, limited scope, proprietary target date assets — all reported as one number
Performance composites still do not compare across providers
Kolluri: "no two composites are ever going to be the same"
By her recollection, only about half of OCIO assets fit the CFA Institute's composite definitions in her firm's survey
The shortlist starts with about two hours of discovery, not a database screen
Kolluri asks committees what keeps them up at night, then matches style and bias rather than category
Finalist meetings are deliberately narrow — "no dog and pony shows allowed"
AI has changed neither the client's asks nor the meeting that decides the mandate
Venkatraman: "it's people hiring people"
Curcio Webb terminated its own retainer consulting business in the first quarter of this year to stay exclusively on project work
The provider field is past 100 firms by the host's count, drawing in consultants, asset managers, banks, custodians and wealth platforms
From Laser Spectroscopy to Institutional Consulting
Kolluri describes a career path with a few not-so-typical turns — she started as a physics major in Mumbai, India, and was offered a place at Bombay University to do a master's by research in laser spectroscopy
She decided lab life was not for her, and the pivot was not to finance: "So naturally I did what anyone with a logical bent would do. I pivoted into advertising and marketing." She admits it was fun
After moving to the US she shifted again — "I earned an MBA in finance and completed the CFA while my kids were babies"
She taught statistics as an adjunct professor for a time, which she says may explain why she still enjoys problem solving
She has spent more than 20 years in institutional investment consulting, eight of them researching investment managers and markets before joining Curcio Webb, where she has been for more than 13 years
Today she leads the investment team, works the larger and more complex projects herself, and provides oversight to her consultants
Venkatraman notes this is the first time the show has had an OCIO search and evaluation consultant on
What Curcio Webb Does, and How Big It Is
The firm was founded in 1997 by two partners, Jamie Curcio and Gordon Webb, to provide objective, independent consulting to institutional clients
Independence is the pitch and the structure — Curcio Webb remains 100% employee-owned with seven partners, and Kolluri notes with pride that it is also a majority woman-owned firm
The firm runs what it calls a stewardship model, treating itself as steward to clients, to the providers who support them, to the company and to colleagues
Search, evaluation, implementation and transition support span investments, benefits administration, health and welfare, and actuarial services
"We have worked with over 700 clients in our history with more than 3,000 engagements", and about 140 of the Fortune 500 companies over the firm's history
She offers the Fortune 500 count not as a statistic but as evidence of repeat work with large, sophisticated organizations
Venkatraman's own introduction put the recent volume at over 130 search and evaluation engagements in the last four years alone, including some of the largest and most complex asset pools in the market
Clients were primarily corporate retirement plans until a few years ago; endowments and foundations have been the significant growth area over the last five years, alongside multi-employer Taft-Hartley plans, government plans and private university hospital systems
On scale: "I think the largest plan that we worked with, across of course three or four asset pools combined, had over 110 billion in assets"
The work is not only traditional consultant, ERISA 3(38) or OCIO manager searches — it extends to custom target date funds, managed accounts, PEPs, trust and custody, and private market specialists
Large pension plans and endowments increasingly want an OCIO for private markets alone — a provider that does nothing else
Why the Firm Walked Away From Retainer Consulting
Curcio Webb no longer does traditional investment manager searches as a primary business, though it will evaluate an existing lineup — she cites a large state plan with an internal team that comes back on a repeat basis for a fiduciary checklist on guidelines and manager performance
The bigger structural decision came last year: with project search and evaluation growing, the firm had to choose between adding heads to run both sides or aligning with what the rest of the company does
"We made this conscious choice to actually terminate that retainer consulting business" — completed as of the first quarter of this year, leaving the firm exclusively on project work
Kolluri says the legacy retainer clients were long-standing relationships that came out of the benefits administration work rather than competitive RFPs, so the firm was never competing in the market it now evaluates
Venkatraman's read is that exiting consulting makes the search and evaluation work more objective
How OCIO Demand Broadened Beyond Pensions
The growth of the OCIO model is, in her view, one of the most significant industry developments of the last decade
Ten years ago most search activity was for traditional investment consultants; OCIO mandates were occasional and exploratory, because OCIO fees were often several multiples of consulting fees and deterred adoption
Widespread adoption arrived between 2015 and 2020, and it was primarily within defined benefit plans
Then the pandemic changed the mix — during and after Covid, demand ramped up beyond pensions and into DC plans
Staffing was the driver: teams were so lean by that point, she says, that the trend held
"The committees are also stretched for time. This is not their day job, we do need the support" is what clients told her
She found the DC pull surprising, since decision-making speed is not the obvious selling point there, and clients answered that what they wanted was day-to-day support
Her firm initially bid these mandates both ways, consulting and OCIO, until clients started saying "no, we just want OCIO, don't bother going consulting, we've seen that and need the help"
The Reasons Committees Actually Give
Early on the draw was speed of decision-making, implementation and support, and it built slowly after the global financial crisis because of fees; volatile markets then pushed committees to concede this was not their area of expertise
First of her three top reasons today: shifting fiduciary risk to more experienced investment professionals, given the litigious environment
Committees arrive wanting education first, and she walks them through the models — traditional consulting, OCIO, and the spectrum between, which can be customized to the areas where they want help
The question she hears is what delegation actually means for them: "are they handing the keys of the car to them"
The eye-opener she insists on: "it doesn't matter how muchever they delegate to these OCIOs, they're always going to be ultimately responsible from a fiduciary perspective" — and she says it does not deter them
Second reason: private markets. Institutions are allocating more to privates because a growing share of economic growth is happening outside the public markets
Companies are staying private much longer than they did in the past — she names SpaceX as the example
Privates offer diversification, return potential and access not available in traditional stock and bond markets, but need a specialized skill set, research and implementation capability
Pensions, endowments and foundations can withstand the illiquidity and have long been adopters; increasingly they conclude it is better outsourced than trying to work out what a deal on the table means
Venkatraman's summary of the case: expertise, access, resources, implementation and ongoing monitoring, a far cry from overseeing a public portfolio, and in his view worth it
Fee Compression Took Cost Off the Table
Third reason: cost efficiency. She says OCIO firms leveraging scale are able to negotiate significantly lower investment management fees than individual plans can ever achieve independently
That math is why DC adoption has strengthened — participants capture the investment management savings even though the plan pays an advisory fee on top
Competition among providers has compressed fees from several multiples of consulting fees ten years ago to something far closer
"We actually had one search where one of the providers said we indifferent to which models you adopt, our fees still going to be the same"
Venkatraman asked the obvious follow-up: how does a provider in that position make money
Her answer: they are getting a higher fee, and that case was, she says, truly an aberration
Scale compounds for providers, she says: amassing assets lets them advertise the assets, which brings more clients, in something like a domino effect
First-Time Searches, Re-Bids and a Crowded Field
Asked whether searches are first-timers or incumbents being checked, her answer is "Can I say we see it all?"
A significant chunk are committees in a consulting model exploring OCIO for the first time
Early adopters a decade in come back for diligence, or because a team member left, or because they are unhappy with performance; in the pension space counsel is telling them to review their OCIO or advisor
The firm runs both deep-dive evaluations and lighter benchmarking checks on services and fees
Venkatraman on the supply side: "It has become so crowded, incredibly crowded" — the Institute's website carries a taxonomy of provider types, and his read is that everybody has jumped on the bandwagon
Kolluri agrees the field now spans investment consultants, asset managers, wealth management platforms, custodians and long-standing niche specialists
Origins still show in behavior: traditional consultants bring a service, governance and support DNA; asset managers are focused on performance and propose portfolios differently; wealth managers, banks and custodians add layers of fees
No two clients are the same, she says — fit is decided by size of assets and complexity, and she does not think everybody is a fit for everybody
The firm meets provider leadership, asset allocation teams, research teams and operational staff outside of project work, sometimes for three-quarters of a day or a whole day, to judge stability, thinking and investment biases
She spends a fair amount of every day answering requests for meetings and diligence calls, and has to space them out
Venkatraman says the pattern gives him flashbacks to the traditional consultant's job — clients, board meeting prep, and staying on top of what a thousand investment managers are doing
He adds that through the Institute's work with OCIO providers, most of them are thinking long and hard about how to organize OCIO service distribution — whether to run it like consultant relations, calling on people like her professionally, or fold it into sales
Mega Plans With In-House Teams Are Now Outsourcing
Venkatraman notes the market started in the small and mid market and has moved up to multi-billion-dollar pension plans that already have investment scale, and asks what motivates a plan with 20 or 30 years of in-house experience
Kolluri confirms the arc: in the early days it was smaller pension funds, endowments and foundations without staff or resources, and it broadened out by size after the financial crisis
Over at least the last three to four years, she has seen mega-size pension plans with long-standing in-house teams — teams she says have done a great job — move to outsource
She cannot name the mandates, but says the overriding cause was cost
On the first one: everything was on the table because the internal team was changing, and the client was weighing outsourcing against hiring — then "literally the moment the fees came in for the outsource model, it was almost like a no-brainer"
The outsourced cost was compelling against the cost of an in-house team, and a great in-house track record did not change the answer, because from the CFO's office it is a bottom-line decision
The second half of the case is resourcing, not savings: an in-house team might be two people on privates and two on fixed income, against a firm with research and operations resources across everything
"It just seems you're getting so much more for a little more money, or actually even in the case of many of these searches, for less money"
Venkatraman adds that the ancillary services and support these firms bring rarely get discussed but are very real — community involvement, fundraising, lines of credit
Nobody Agrees What Counts as OCIO Assets
Asked about the maturity of the space, Kolluri says it is still early days and "Everybody's jumped into the fray and it's almost like a free-for-all going on right now"
The standing obstacle is that OCIO assets are defined and reported inconsistently from firm to firm, which is what makes apples-to-apples comparison hard
Her firm's fix is interrogation at the data-collection stage: are the assets fully outsourced, hybrid or limited scope, and are proprietary target date fund assets being counted
The aim, in her phrase, is to separate the wheat from the chaff and get to a real measure of a provider's experience
Venkatraman's phrase for the exercise: "Peeling the layers of the onion"
Even the definitional edges resist a rule — ERISA 3(38) versus 3(21) is clear, but that only covers US pensions
"What if you have discretion, the word discretion, what does that mean?" — discretion on paper that still requires board permission is hard to classify, and one committee's way of working is not another's
She credits the Institute's standardization work directly and says someone has to take charge of streamlining it
Why OCIO Composites Still Don't Compare
Performance composites and benchmarking practices are, for her, the harder problem than asset data — on assets she can at least force providers to break out US-only figures and supply qualitative detail, even if it is like pulling teeth
"no two composites are ever going to be the same", because policies, preferences and the degree of governance control differ underneath a label like 60/40
OCIO portfolios are customized per client: different objectives, risk tolerances, liquidity needs, private markets exposure, legacy assets and governance preferences
"And then you're going to put them all into a composite and then compare them to a benchmark, which, how, I'm sorry, but that's how"
Her firm goes beyond the reported composite for context on how a provider did in specific market environments
Long before the CFA Institute published its guidelines, Curcio Webb was demanding the breakdown itself: "We said all right, we want your composite, but give us a breakdown by 60/40, 70/30, 80/20" — with privates and without
One of her team members sat on the CFA Institute panel that worked on those guidelines
Even a matched 60/40 composite does not tell the whole story, because qualitative factors are built into the policy benchmark
Her first test is whether the provider beat its own policy benchmark and helped the client achieve what it wanted
From the firm's survey last year on compliance with the CFA guidelines: "I forget the exact number, but I think only about half the assets, OCIO assets, they were able to put into composites as defined by the CFA Institute"
Venkatraman notes the Institute has said firms can create their own composites, which leads straight back to the challenge of comparing one firm against another
How the Shortlist Gets Built
Venkatraman puts his own side's count on the field — "the number of providers by Chestnut's count now is more than 100, 120" — and asks how she decides which community to approach
Discovery is, in her view, the most important part of the process — at least two hours with a client up front, individually if the committee cannot be assembled
The investment policy statement only records what somebody thought at some point, so the questions are aimed at the sitting committee: how they think, what they want to accomplish, "What keeps them up at night?", risk tolerances, preferences and biases
She does not treat the committee's view as automatically right. On one endowment and foundation project the committee was adamant about avoiding private markets and illiquid investments, pointing at ten years of strong public market returns
They did select an OCIO and said they would start thinking about it; on a check-in call she learned they still have not adopted privates — and with public markets continuing to deliver, she says they are justified
Because the firm knows how providers implement and where their styles and biases sit, discovery output maps to cultural and philosophical fit
The recommendation often goes down to individuals, not just firms: she will tell an OCIO which people on its team would fit a particular committee, framed as a suggestion
Shortlists are deliberately mixed — five to six providers, two or three of one type, a couple of another, and sometimes a name included because "sometimes it's good to see what you don't want"
Specialists carry higher fees and consultants are relatively moderate, but the specialist skill set is attractive; her advice to clients is to hear them out so they know what they did not select
The Finalist Meeting Is Where It Is Decided
By the time proposals are summarized the firm has, in her words, really beaten it up, through back-and-forth with providers on what their answers meant
RFP questions are built around what the firm heard in discovery rather than a standard questionnaire, which keeps comparison focused on what matters to that client
Sometimes a capable provider's assigned RFP team does a poor job, and the firm knows it, but the process has to run on the RFP and the questions
From about five candidates the firm brings it down to about three finalists, with a custom, narrow finals agenda
"No, as we like to say, no dog and pony shows allowed" — the agenda stays on the client, the plan and what the committee is grappling with
Clients do not want to sit and hear how big a provider is or how many resources it brings — that was vetted earlier
Venkatraman's addition, a favorite of his: how many offices do you have
The firm spends an inordinate amount of time prepping the finalists too, telling them what to avoid — do not pitch managed accounts to a client that has said it does not want them
"It's not spoon feeding them, don't get us wrong, very careful" — the aim is a fair, equal and relevant hearing
Selection criteria are developed with the client at the start of the process, based on what they want to hear about; DC plans make this harder because the issues are less obvious, while pension plans and endowments give her plenty to work with
Investment philosophy, a clean-slate portfolio, proposed changes, macro views and market outlook all get tested for whether they were thought through for this client
Venkatraman describes a holistic value management framework his side has worked on, which looks at providers across investments, service, and operations technology, on the argument that a client is buying far more than a single strategy
In the end she says it comes down to the team and how it engages the committee — the one thing the search consultant can control is preparation: "we prep them and then we say all right guys, good luck, and then they come, and then sometimes they totally kill it and sometimes like, what happened to you?"
Where AI Stops
Venkatraman's read of the finals is that AI has not conquered it — "it's people hiring people"
On the client side Kolluri sees almost nothing. Committees and benefits teams are overwhelmed with day-to-day work, and nothing has changed in their requests or asks
Providers have adopted it, and she assumes it is being used for research work, but "That finalist meeting, that engagement, AI can't replace"
Her own team reads the proposals themselves — what was said, why it was said, whether it is what the client wanted to hear, and where a provider dropped the ball
"May help you summarize and gather data, but actually gleaning the insights, it's you got to do. And AI is not perfect for sure"
What Curcio Webb Says Makes It Different
Asked for the secret sauce, she starts with focus: search, evaluation and implementation is what the firm always said it wanted to do, and it stuck to it
The differentiator she puts first is the people — a flat organization where hires come from different parts of the industry, including the plan sponsor side, and now help clients with the work they used to do themselves
"We have no other client or revenue except from our clients" — the independence and the stewardship principles are what she credits for repeat business
Integration across practices matters in the benefits space: she can be discussing investments and pull in the head of the actuarial practice, or bring recordkeeping into what looks like an investment problem
The process is a framework, not a script. One client needed an evaluation and a possible change inside a compressed timetable, so instead of five candidates narrowed to three finalists with a separate agenda-setting stage, the firm went to three providers, reviewed proposals and fees, and brought all three in ten days later on a pre-supplied agenda
"That worked like a charm for so many clients that were really in a hurry" — with diligence checks and documentation unchanged
Other clients want nine candidates, which she says becomes noisy and crowded, and the firm works with them anyway
Her team are CFAs with consulting and research backgrounds, which she says lets them read an asset allocation, expected return and downside risk both as finance and as what it means for that client
What the Industry Still Needs
Venkatraman thanks her for engaging with the Institute — she attended its last forum in the spring in Boston — and describes the mission as increasing transparency, improving standards and improving access and understanding for end clients and intermediaries alike
Asked what the Institute could do that would benefit the industry, Kolluri offers no additional ask and says the transparency effort between last year and this year is going to be valuable for the industry as a whole
"I think having somebody actually spearheading this effort is priceless" — day to day, individual firms do what they can, but as an industry she does not think everyone is on the same page
"I don't think there's a magic way to get to where we want. I think it's a journey"
The bottom line she leaves is that the OCIO decision has stopped being a fee decision and become a fit decision — the cost objection has been competed away, delegation never transfers the fiduciary duty, and with provider assets and composites still reported on incompatible terms, the comparison work falls to whoever is willing to force the breakdown.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Curcio Webb (Kolluri's firm — 100% employee-owned, majority woman-owned, founded 1997, exited retainer investment consulting in the first quarter of this year to focus exclusively on search and evaluation)
The Investment Solutions Institute (Venkatraman's group — publishes the provider taxonomy, works on standardizing how OCIO assets are reported, and holds the forum Kolluri attended in Boston in the spring)
CFA Institute (Published composite guidelines for OCIO performance reporting; one of Kolluri's team members sat on the panel, and she thinks her firm's survey found only about half of OCIO assets could be fitted to them)
SpaceX (Her example of a company staying private far longer than companies used to)
Custom target date funds, managed accounts and PEPs (Specialty provider searches the firm now runs alongside OCIO mandates; she says a striking number of large DC plans are looking at PEPs)
Private markets OCIO specialists (A distinct mandate type — large pension plans and endowments hiring a provider that does nothing but privates)
Books & Resources Mentioned
The CFA Institute's OCIO composite guidelines (The standard her firm's survey measured provider compliance against)
The Investment Solutions Institute's provider taxonomy (Published on the group's website; Kolluri points to it as the list of provider types in the market)
Curcio Webb's survey last year on composite compliance (Where the roughly half-of-assets finding came from)
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