CIO Innovation Awards: Nominations Open Until August 12

For 11 years, CIO has honored the accomplishments of you, the chief investment officers, and your top managers with our Industry Innovation Awards.

On Tuesday, December 7, at New York’s Chelsea Piers, CIO will once again bring together institutional investors and those who provide for them in a glittering evening of celebration.

Now, it’s time to nominate deserving asset owners and asset managers/service providers for this year’s awards. Nominators will remain anonymous. Please submit nominations by Aug. 12.

Since we started these awards in 2010, “innovation” has perhaps become an overused buzzword. While others may confuse innovation with change, we do not: Our goal is to highlight the truly innovative approaches to asset management and asset allocating, separating the merely different from the meaningful.

For example: Our 2019/2020 winner for defined benefit (DB) plans below $20 billion was Jonathan Glidden, chief investment officer of Delta Air Lines, who took the plan on when it was 38% funded (and four times larger than the company’s market capitalization at the time), added strategies that included portable alpha and successful co-investments, and made it well on the way to becoming 90% funded by 2025.

The 2018 winner of the defined contribution (DC) plan category, Bob Hunkeler, CIO of International Paper, became an early adopter of brokerage windows and led his company to be one of the first in the country with a fully unbundled plan with independently awarded investment management, recordkeeping, and custody assignments. Now, the plan offers a nearly limitless choice of investments with a three-tiered investment lineup of balanced funds, asset class funds, a brokerage window, a state-of-the art recordkeeping platform at about one-fifth of the cost, a number of participant-friendly plan design features, and a customized communications program.

When nominating, ask yourself: Who has done something that is truly different, that might have changed the way we think about this business?

Details

1. Finalists for both asset owners and asset managers/service providers will be announced in early September.
2. The finalists and winners will be chosen by the CIO editorial team in conjunction with an advisory board of former and current CIOs. Some categories (such as investment outsourcing, transition management, and corporate investment strategies) will be judged largely on data collected via the CIO survey system.
3. The overall “CIO of the Year” award—last given to Ash Williams, chief investment officer of the Florida State Board of Administration (SBA) —will be announced at the dinner, and will be drawn from the winners of the asset owner categories.
4. The Lifetime Achievement award, which Robin Diamonte, CIO of Raytheon, received last, will be presented at the dinner.

Our Next Generation Award is presented the evening of the awards dinner, following a competitive hotseat panel and audience poll at the CIO Influential Investors’ Forum earlier that day. The candidates are from members of this year’s NextGen series here: https://www.ai-cio.com/lists/class-of-2021-nextgens/.

To nominate, please follow the survey directions here. THE DEADLINE TO SUBMIT YOUR NOMINATIONS IS AUGUST 12.

Below is a list of CIO’s past Industry Innovation Award winners in their respective allocation categories, and a link to winning managers and service providers:

A list of winning management firms from 2019 is available here.

Related Content:

2019 Industry Innovation Awards

2019 Asset Management & Servicing Winners

2018 Industry Innovation Awards

2018 Asset Management & Servicing Winners