Vanguard Veteran Launches Fractional CIO FirmVanguard Veteran Launches Fractional CIO Firm
Don Bennyhoff, who was at Vanguard for nearly 23 years, hopes to differentiate his new firm by helping RIAs demonstrate their value beyond investment management.
Don Bennyhoff, former senior investment strategist at Vanguard, has launched a new fractional chief investment officer business, Bennyhoff & Co., aimed at serving mid-sized, planning-focused registered investment advisors.
Unlike most outsourced CIO and fractional CIO firms, Bennyhoff’s company will not manage client accounts on a directionary basis. It will help RIAs with some of the investment management decisions, such as evaluating model portfolios, building models and conducting manager search and selection and oversight.
But he also expects to differentiate from those firms by focusing on relationship management and behavioral coaching to help financial advisors demonstrate their value beyond investment management.
“We want to focus on aspects that many OCIO firms and fractional CIO firms tend to either not advertise or not offer, and that’s going to be through a focus on relationship management and how advisors can be better advisors for their clients who are people, not just their portfolios,” he said.
Bennyhoff was part of the team that built Vanguard’s ETF model portfolios, but he was also the co-creator and co-author of the company’s Advisor Alpha, a service model and research study that outlines how advisors can add alpha through relationship-oriented services, rather than trying to outperform the market. That model has since been expanded to quantify the benefits advisors can add by following wealth management best practices.
“Many mid-sized firms—they’ve been traditionally built on a model where you have a small number of financial advisors who’ve been very successful in growing the business, but they’re wearing many hats,” Bennyhoff said. “And they often don’t have quite enough time to devote to their clients and their client relationships as they’d like, mainly because they have so much on their plate.”
Bennyhoff said he’ll work with four to six firms initially, and he’ll charge a monthly retainer fee for his services. He also plans to work with some institutional clients to help with their OCIO searches, and he’ll charge an hourly fee for that.
Most recently, Bennyhoff was the CIO and chairman of the investment committee at Liberty Wealth Advisors, a $1.7 billion RIA that was sold to Prime Capital Financial in 2022. Prior to that, he spent nearly 23 years at Vanguard.
