AIG to Hire CIO for $357B Portfolio | Chief Investment Officer

AIG is on the hunt for a CIO to oversee a portfolio of $357 billion in insurance assets.

The new investment chief would take on overall asset management responsibilities from Executive Vice President William Dooley, who has been with the firm since 1978, a spokesperson confirmed.

The CIO position has been vacant since 2013 when former Global Head of Asset Management Monika Machon was named treasurer for the insurance giant. During her 4-year tenure, she was responsible for all AIG insurance assets and led a multinational team of 175 investment professionals.

In her place, AIG appointed Executive Vice President Brian Schreiber and North American CIO Geoffrey Cornell as deputy CIOs, both reporting to Dooley.

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Since 2013, Schreiber has been managing a $200 billion portfolio of private placements, direct investments, real estate, private equity, structured products, and hedge funds.

In May 2015, Schreiber was named chief strategy officer, tasked with managing all of AIG’s global strategic planning, M&A and divestitures, communications, and investor relations.

Cornell, on the other hand, is responsible for developing asset allocation and managing portfolios for AIG’s property casualty funds.

AIG’s funds are primarily set up to generate investment income, preserve capital, manage liquidity, and gain surplus to support its insurance products. The majority of AIG’s assets backing liabilities are intermediate and long duration fixed income, the spokesperson added.

The hunt for a CIO is the latest part of CEO Peter Hancock’s reshaping of AIG’s management. Since his appointment in September 2014, he has split the company into two divisions: one for commercial clients and the other for consumer operations.

Investors in hedge funds should have made better returns already in 2015 than they did in the whole of 2014, according to new data.

In May, hedge funds continued a run of solid performance with a fifth straight positive month, returning 1.01% in May, data monitor Preqin said.

“The better performance eases some concerns investors may have had about the value of investing in an asset which charges two and twenty.” —Amy Bensted, Preqin“This means hedge funds have now returned 5.44% for 2015 year to date compared to 4.60% for the whole of 2014,” Preqin’s report said.

All leading single-manager hedge fund strategies made gains in May, with equity strategies generating the highest return of 1.28%.

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Leading the pack at the end of May were Asia Pacific-focused hedge funds with a return of 11.03% in the first five months of the year. In second place across this time horizon were activist strategies, with a 9.41% return.

“Following a disappointing 2014, where the benchmark struggled to hit 5% and investors began to show signs of losing patience with the performance of the asset class, this return to better performance is obviously a good sign,” said Amy Bensted, head of hedge fund products at Preqin.

The worst performers so far in 2015 were CTA fund-of-hedge-funds with a 1.17% return—but in the 12 months to the end of May this strategy made 21.9%.

“Stringing together a set of positive returns this year has been welcomed by both investors and fund managers,” said Bensted. “The better performance eases some concerns investors may have had about the value of investing in an asset which charges two and twenty, and reinforces the place that these assets should form in a diversified portfolio.”

Eurekahedge data showed the sector’s assets grew by $92 billion in the first five months of the year, with almost a third of this coming from new investor allocations.

However, despite absorbing most investor assets, North American managers only managed to take in half of the flows they received in the same period last year, Eurekahedge said. These managers saw $17.5 billion in new assets.