A Chef's Kiss to Investments

A restaurant owner alone cannot create a five-star dining experience; they must partner with a larger team of food and industry specialists that provide the finest ingredients and products to produce a world-class menu. Similarly, Wespath’s investment team engages with third-party investment experts, or “asset managers,” to provide the best investment opportunities for our participants.

While we have a 21-strong investment team, there are tens of thousands of investment opportunities making it impossible to continuously research and monitor the entire investable universe ourselves. Instead of selecting each and every individual investment opportunity, Wespath thoughtfully and prudently administers relationships with its asset managers, who have proven expertise in specialized areas of the financial markets and select investments on our behalf.

To return to the food analogy, Wespath is a restaurateur diligently working to curate a world-class menu that will meet the expectations of its valued customers. While a restaurant owner cannot grow or raise the food they serve, they are entirely accountable for the dishes prepared. Therefore, they have carefully vetted food suppliers from across the globe to determine which will produce the finest ingredients for its menu. Like our asset managers, these chosen suppliers come in all shapes and sizes—from small international farms that produce artisanal cheeses in southern France, to local suppliers who have consistently provided the freshest organic strawberries, to larger suppliers that can offer a broader selection of premium meats—from beef to pork to veal.

In advance of partnering with any one supplier, the restauranteur and staff spend a significant amount of time taste-testing different suppliers’ options, understanding the value of the suppliers’ offering, learning if their products have consistently performed over time, understanding the associated costs and so forth.

Wespath’s investment “menu” consists of more than 35 asset managers, culminating in over $27 billion in assets under management as of March 31, 2022. The asset managers we work with range from investment giants like BlackRock, which manages over $10 trillion for many investment styles and strategies, to boutique firms like Brown Capital Management, which specializes in a unique small company strategy. As the organization responsible for your hard-earned retirement funds, it is Wespath’s duty to ensure when your day for retirement comes, you can say, “check please!”