Personal CIO aims to provide extra layer of oversight for ultra-HNW clients. Hirtle Callaghan, a firm that pioneered the concept of the outsourced CIO in the late 1980s, has hired Placemark Investments to provide overlay management for its clients' separately managed accounts (SMA).

Overlay management has to do with account-level rebalancing, restrictions, cash flows, and, where relevant, tax-liability management.

The result of providing overlay management for SMAs, mutual funds and ETFs is something retail investment peddlers call the "unified managed account" (UMA), single-account investment-vehicle combinations that could account for as much as a third of U.S. SMA assets by 2012, according to a recent estimate by the research firm Celent.

Semantics

But Placemark's executive v.p. Randy Bullard emphasizes that Hirtle Callaghan, a firm that works exclusively with ultra-high-net-worth individuals and families, couldn't care less about the retail implications of the UMA.

Rather, says Bullard, Hirtle Callaghan has hired Placemark to provide enhanced efficiencies around taxes and other risks in the context of an approach to portfolio construction and management of its own that just happens to use something a retailer might call an SMA.

However sniffy about -- or indifferent to -- retail terminology some high-end advisories may be, Bullard sees them as a significant growth engine for overlay managers as they look for ways to help clients protect value in uncertain times.

West Conshohocken, Pa.-based Hirtle Callaghan provides its high-net-worth and institutional clients advice on something like $15 billion in assets. Wellesley, Mass.- and Dallas-based Placemark has about $3 billion in assets under management. -FWR

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