Since joining the Texas Municipal Retirement System in January 2024, CIO Yup Kim has been focused on updating the team and the portfolio of the $44 billion retirement fund.

The fund provides retirement benefits for nearly 950 Texas cities and serves more than 260,000 members, retirees and beneficiaries.

If you count Kim among the total, he has replaced 50% of the 16-member investment team since joining and is focused on how to implement thematic investing and how to scale the system in an investment universe he calls “too vast for us to everything.”

His accomplishments so far include reducing the “number of asset classes [the team covers] from nine to five, to simplify the asset-allocation framework and increase flexibility and updated benchmarks to better reflect the new investment strategy and structure.”

TMRS is planning its portfolio based on five global megatrends:

• Digital transformation: Use of software and artificial intelligence to automate enterprise and consumer processes, along with the necessary tools for securing those processes and the infrastructure to support the digital shift.
• Health care innovation: Discovery, development and production of novel therapies, as well as software and data tools that drive greater alignment of health care stakeholders.
• Industrial resilience: Products and services that strengthen and secure supply chains in critical industries.
• Energy modernization: Energy and power solutions across production, transmission and distribution.
• Financial empowerment: Financial technology, wealth management and insurance tools that help individuals and institutions navigate the changing financial landscape.

The system has posted one-, five- and 10-year annualized returns, net of fees, of 10.5%, 6.82% and 6.6%, respectively, for the period ending December 31, 2024.

The winner of CIO’s 2025 Industry Innovation Award for Public Defined Contribution says his next goal is to better align the investment team structure with the narrowed asset class focus.

Kim says 2025 has been a “year when quality assets traded expensively” and says he is focused on keeping the quality of investment options high “at the top end of the funnel.”

He has also focused on the system’s visibility in the world, citing developing “a professional, private-market-quality website to improve transparency and sourcing efficiency” among his successes so far.

For 2026, he expects his focus will continue to be on working closely with the system’s technology department to enable artificial intelligence tools for the investment team. AI, Kim expects, will be useful to “magnify the productivity and efficiency across everything we do.”

From there, Kim says he thinks the role will be 50% investment management and 50% people management.

“It is my responsibility to amplify the productivity and efficiency of the whole team,” Kim says.

On the people side, he stresses the importance of recruiting top talent “to raise execution capacity” while modernizing “compensation and recognition programs to attract and retain high performers” and upgrade “reporting and delegation structures to enable faster, more confident decisionmaking.”

His vision is to continue developing and communicating “a clear long-term investment vision that drives all decisions,” while building a platform within a public system that aligns policy, governance and talent to “improve agility and focus.”

—Amy Resnick