Outsourced chief investment officer provider GEM Investments has officially named Matt Bank co-CIO of its $12 billion business as part of a multi-year succession plan. Bank will share the role with Mike Smith, the current investment chief, through 2025 before taking over as sole CIO the next year.
In 2026, Bank will oversee policy construction, asset allocation, and portfolio strategy. Smith will become a market strategist, focusing on macroeconomic analysis and portfolio tactics.
Since joining GEM in 2018, Bank has helped shape the firm’s investment policy and portfolio customization. When he was named deputy CIO in 2023, he worked with Smith on portfolio strategy, risk management, and market exposure and consolidated the client portfolio management and investment research teams.
This move is part of the OCIO’s succession plan started in 2022. GEM Co-Founder Stephanie Lynch told Institutional Investor that the firm followed a similar plan with its first CIO.
When Lynch launched the firm, she said that many hedge funds and small boutique investment firms were built around a star system. While that approach worked for a time, she noted that “there’s a time horizon where people should stay engaged in this business,” and eventually, that engagement fades.
When considering entering the OCIO market, the firm wanted to replicate the success of endowment investment offices. Lynch emphasized that if an OCIO is serving as a client’s sole investment office, it needed to think beyond the careers of its current leadership.
“Thinking of the next generation of talent almost on day one” was “a critical element” in building an enduring firm, Lynch said.
Bank said that GEM focuses on staying a boutique investment firm. “The strategy doesn’t scale infinitely,” he explained. “We cannot be part of a $100 billion firm and get the exceptional returns that we want.”
Many investment strategies simply do not scale, and generating outsized returns requires unconventional approaches. “It’s a huge challenge for large pensions to execute in alternative markets because they have too many dollars to put to work,” Bank explained. “There just aren’t that many good ideas out there.”
Beyond investment constraints, scale impacts culture. Relationships become more fragmented in larger firms, making deep connections with the team harder to maintain. “We wanted to replicate what we saw in university endowment programs — being the in-house investment office means engaging with CFOs and other stakeholders to ensure real integration,” Bank said. He stressed that when firms expand to serve hundreds of clients, connectivity is lost, and the relationship dilutes into a vendor model.
He also pointed out that many firms were designed with the intent to be sold rather than structured for smooth succession, which can undermine long-term investment success. “A lot of these firms were built to be sold and not for smooth succession.”
