Goldman Sachs can benefit as megamanagers gain OCIO share

Goldman Sachs is on the right side of a market-share shift that is reshaping institutional asset management. As pensions, endowments and corporate plans hand more decision-making to outsourced chief investment officers, the biggest multi-asset firms are winning the mandates that matter most, including Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s $70 billion combined wins from Verizon and Lockheed Martin and its $25 billion assignment from Eli Lilly.

Scale is becoming the sales pitch

The outsourced chief investment officer market has grown into a $4.8 trillion global business by late 2024, with the U.S. alone accounting for $2.5 trillion, according to Praxis Rock’s directory. That same directory lists 29 OCIO providers and says the 22 profiled in depth manage more than $3 trillion in outsourced assets, with Mercer, Goldman Sachs, BlackRock, Russell Investments and Morgan Stanley leading the pack. The message for Goldman employees is plain: institutional clients are concentrating more assets with a smaller group of firms that can handle broad mandates, complex reporting and day-to-day implementation.

Cerulli’s 2025 U.S. Outsourced Chief Investment Officer Function report helps explain why the prize is getting bigger. Goldman Sachs Asset Management cites that report on its OCIO and Fiduciary Management page, noting that it is based on 2024 AUM and was published in November 2025; Cerulli also projected nearly $1.3 trillion in new OCIO inflows through 2029 from first-time adopters. That is the kind of forecast that turns OCIO from a niche institutional product into a core battleground for wallet share.

What clients are buying when they hire an OCIO

OCIO is not just portfolio management with a different label. For a pension, foundation or endowment, it is a governance decision: the institution outsources part of the investment process itself, not just a sleeve of assets. That makes breadth matter, because clients want public markets, private markets, risk oversight and implementation in one place, rather than stitching together a shelf of managers.

That preference creates a structural advantage for megamanagers. Fee pressure pushes clients to demand more for less, while governance demands reward firms that can provide frequent reporting, clear accountability and operational depth. In practical terms, the winners are the firms that can sit across from a CIO, a board and a consultant with the same answer to every question: performance, risk, liquidity, implementation and oversight all live inside one platform.

Why Goldman has been pressing into the category

Goldman’s institutional-client-solutions page explicitly lists Outsourced Chief Investment Officer as part of its offering, and the firm says its Assets Under Supervision includes assets under management plus other client assets over which it has full or partial discretion. That definition matters because OCIO assets are not just a product line, they are part of the broader franchise economics that tie together alternatives, fiduciary management and institutional distribution.

The recent mandate wins show that the strategy is not theoretical. Pensions & Investments reported on July 9, 2026 that Goldman Sachs Asset Management won two OCIO mandates totaling $70 billion from Verizon and Lockheed Martin. It also reported in October 2025 that Eli Lilly tapped Goldman Sachs Asset Management for a $25 billion OCIO deal. For Goldman staff, those numbers are more than a bragging point: large delegated mandates can deepen relationships, create follow-on opportunities in alternatives and private markets, and lock in a client before a rival can sell the next sleeve.

Goldman has also kept adding senior leadership in the business. Pensions & Investments reported on September 2, 2025 that Goldman Sachs Asset Management named Carolyn Schuster-Woldan managing director for its U.K. OCIO team. That kind of hire signals that the firm sees OCIO as a long-term franchise, not a temporary distribution play.

Why smaller and specialist managers are losing ground

The OCIO business used to look closer to consulting than asset management, and Capco traces its origin to the 1970s as a bridge between the two. But the market has moved well beyond that early model. In 2023, Pensions & Investments wrote about more OCIO deals that included liftouts of in-house teams, which is a clue that clients now want not just a recommendation engine but a full operating model.

That shift is bad news for smaller specialists that cannot match the reporting cadence, technology stack or global product breadth of a Goldman, Mercer or BlackRock. Performance still matters, but it is no longer enough on its own. A specialist can outperform in a narrow bucket and still lose if a board wants one counterparty that can handle governance, implementation and private market exposure across an entire balance sheet.

What it means for people inside Goldman

For analysts, associates, VPs and managing directors, OCIO is one of those businesses where internal collaboration directly affects revenue. Teams in alternatives, wealth management, institutional sales, operations, technology, compliance and client service all touch the same client conversation, and that makes the platform more valuable when it is coordinated well. If Goldman wants to keep winning mandates like Verizon, Lockheed Martin and Eli Lilly, it has to look less like a collection of products and more like a single operating system for institutions.

The career signal is equally important. OCIO clients expect firms to speak the language of trustees, consultants and CIOs, not just portfolio managers, so the talent that rises in this business is often the talent that can translate across those groups. That widens the path for employees who understand allocation, reporting and governance, and it raises the bar for everyone else in a market where the biggest mandates now flow to the biggest platforms.