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Group 29829

Dakota Live! Call 283

August 21, 2026

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11:00 a.m. EST Call 2:00 p.m. EST Call
Group 29845

283

On Dakota Live! 283

Tim Yates, President & Chief Executive Officer, Commonfund OCIO

Cover all institutional accounts in the Chicago Metro Area

Receive a detailed breakdown of Marquette Associates

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Key Account Highlights Marquette Associates

Chicago

Marquette Associates is a Consultant specializing in DC Consultant services, headquartered at 180 North Lasalle Street Suite 3500, Chicago, IL, and operating within the Chicago metro area. Established in 1986, the firm is employee-owned and focuses on providing discretionary and non-discretionary investment consulting services. It serves a client base of approximately 400 institutions, including public funds, not-for-profit organizations, Taft-Hartley, and public funds, while expanding into private client and high-net-worth individual markets. Marquette Associates manages an AUA of $428 billion as of March 31, 2026, supported by a team of around 100 professionals across five offices.

The firm’s platform consists of a comprehensive four-phase manager research process and a satellite model for portfolio construction, emphasizing fixed income strategies that incorporate sector rotation, curve positioning, and security selection to generate excess returns. It prioritizes commingled funds and separate accounts over mutual funds due to cost and flexibility considerations. Marquette Associates also maintains a focus on alternative investments, including private equity, hedge funds, real estate, and structured credit, with plans to onboard new managers in 2024 and expand multi-sector strategies targeting 150–250 basis points of alpha. Its consulting business remains the core operation, while the OCIO business constitutes approximately 10% of its AUA and continues to grow.

Allocator Interview Highlights

Tim Yates
President & Chief Executive Officer, Commonfund OCIO

Timothy T. Yates, Jr., is President and Chief Executive Officer of Commonfund OCIO. In that role, Tim leads all aspects of Commonfund OCIO’s business, overseeing a team of investment professionals who advise, implement, and monitor custom, total-portfolio solutions for nonprofit institutions. Commonfund OCIO focuses exclusively on the nonprofit world and oversees more than $15 billion in assets on behalf of foundations, endowments, and other mission-driven organizations. Tim’s path to investment management was an unusual one. Before entering finance, he taught Spanish and Italian at Fordham Preparatory School in the Bronx. He joined Commonfund as an associate in the CF Private Equity Associate Program and went on to hold several roles across the private equity business—including responsibility for custom accounts and serving as a senior member of the firm’s emerging-markets private equity team, with a focus on Latin America. In 2003, Tim became one of the founding members of
Commonfund’s OCIO platform, where he was responsible for the design, tailoring, and implementation of total-portfolio solutions for clients. More than twenty years later, he now leads that business as President and Chief Executive Officer. Commonfund itself was founded in 1971 with a grant from the Ford Foundation as a mission-driven, nonprofit organization built to serve nonprofits. As a private, nonprofit firm beholden to its clients rather than outside shareholders, Commonfund occupies a distinctive position in the OCIO landscape, and in February 2023 the OCIO entity was formally established as Commonfund OCIO, Inc. Tim is a member of the Commonfund OCIO Executive Group and Investment Committee and serves on the firm’s Asset Allocation and Operating Committees. Through the Commonfund Institute and the widely followed NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments, he also has a data vantage point on how nonprofit institutions are actually investing that few of his peers can match. Tim earned a Bachelor of Arts in Modern Languages from Trinity College and an M.B.A. in Finance, with a designation in International Business, from Fordham University.

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