Five months after launch and six client mandates in, arcpoint OCIO, the dedicated outsourced chief investment office (OCIO) serving adviser-led practices, licensees and private clients, has appointed two partners. Brad Creighton joins as Partner and Co-CIO, sharing investment leadership with Founding Partner, CEO and Co-CIO Jacqueline Fernley and chairing the firm’s Investment Committee. Tracey Wahlberg joins as Partner and Director, Investment Management, and leads the firm’s AI and data-science capability.
Both appointments reflect the same thesis: market regimes now change faster than most portfolios were built to absorb, and dynamic asset allocation is increasingly the difference between portfolios that keep pace and those that do not. Brad managed global macro portfolios at Millennium Capital Partners and led dynamic asset allocation at AMP. Tracey adds more than 15 years of equities research across global and Asia Pacific markets, along with the AI research platform she has built to support arcpoint’s investment process.
Asked why the firm made two senior hires at once, Jacqueline Fernley said: “The whole point of a founding team is the quality of the bench you put behind every client decision. Brad has managed multi-asset and global macro portfolios at firms that set the standard globally. He sees markets and the role of portfolio construction differently, and he is relentlessly focused on what actually lands in a client’s portfolio. Two senior decision-makers accountable for every mandate, supported by a formal Investment Committee, is how you deliver consistent outcomes through a market cycle rather than a single point of view.”
A true Co-CIO, not a deputy
Confirming a two-person Chief Investment Officer model answers the question that follows any young firm directly: what happens when investment decisions rest on a single individual. Brad’s blend of multi-asset portfolio management and global macro experience sits squarely alongside Fernley’s own, so every mandate has two senior investors accountable for it and continuity of judgement through market cycles and personnel change alike.
“What drew me to arcpoint is how central the client is to everything we do. It sounds obvious, but it is not always how things go, given the pressures the industry is under. The job is not to hold a house view for its own sake, or because it is the most scalable thing to deliver. It is to produce genuine investment outcomes, in a way that is both disciplined and aligned to the practice’s chosen mode of advice. Building that with two of us fully accountable, and a talented team around us, is how we earn the trust that comes with managing someone’s capital,” Creighton said.
Deepening the bench: Tracey Wahlberg joins as Partner
The second appointment deepens the bench behind the two CIOs. Much of the conversation about artificial intelligence in investing has centred on fund managers using it for stock selection; arcpoint is applying the same capability to its outsourced CIO model, from scratch and without legacy. That allows arcpoint to offer a range of bespoke services to wealth practices, family offices and foundations at scale. Tracey joins after founding her own business focused on developing proprietary investment management tools, extending arcpoint’s ability to build the customised mandates clients require. She leads that work as a partner with a seat and a vote on the Investment Committee.
“Tracey has proven herself to us on the investment substance and on the fit, repeatedly, which is why she joins as a partner, not an employee,” Fernley said. “We carry no legacy systems, so we can build capability through an AI-native lens, from scratch and at speed. We launched our client portal six weeks ago; it gives our clients the specific services they need from us in real time as well as key portfolio construction tools. It has been very well received.”