Home ListingJune 18, 2015

Vanderbilt’s Risk Chief Joins OCIO

The two-time <em>Forty Under Forty </em>member Bola Olusanya will manage US equity portfolios for Strategic Investment Group.

Reported by Featured Author

Bola Olusanya Art by John CuneoOutsourced-CIO (OCIO) Strategic Investment Group has hired Bola Olusanya from Vanderbilt University’s $4 billion endowment.

The two-time Forty Under Forty member will oversee the firm’s US equity portfolios and manager due diligence as a managing director on the global equities team, the firm said.

Olusanya, who began his position on Monday, will report directly to the firm’s three co-CIOs: Eric Bendickson, Markus Krygier, and Tim O’Hara.

“Our extensive experience and thought leadership in analyzing and overseeing global equity portfolios for our clients is further enhanced by Bola’s arrival,” said Brian Murdock, president and CEO of Strategic Investment Group.

According to CIO’s 2015 OCIO Buyer’s Guide, Strategic Investment Group had $23.2 billion in full discretionary assets as of September 30, 2014.

Olusanya served as managing director for more than seven years at Vanderbilt, responsible for handling risk as well as the endowment’s emerging markets equity and global fixed income portfolios.

“My role is to look at risk across our entire portfolio, and not just quantitatively,” Nigerian-born Olusanya told CIO in 2013. “I have the quant background—and growing up where I did, risk management is part of life—but I also have the qualitative background.”

During his tenure at the Nashville, Tennessee-based university, Olusanya and his team built a bespoke means of viewing the entire portfolio in real time—“something essential to risk management, enabling us to look at different risk factors, decide which ones will outperform, and take advantage of those mis-pricings.”

The system—named IRIS—was intended to be a risk tool, Olusanya said, “but it dawned on us that it was hard to get clean data from multiple sources so it became an enterprise-wide investment management platform.”

Prior to Vanderbilt, the 40-year-old also spent time in equity research and consulting at Markit Data Analytics and Research, formerly known as QSG. He also worked as a quant analyst at Emory University’s now-$6 billion endowment.

Olusanya has an MBA from Emory, a master’s degree in computer science from the University of Lagos, and a bachelor’s degree from the University of Ibadan.