Andrew Palmer
As part of the 2025 Industry Innovation Awards, CIO will honor Andrew Palmer, who retired June 30 after a decade as CIO of the $73.5 billion Maryland State Retirement and Pension System, with its Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition of his contributions to the industry.
The award will be presented on October 16 at CIO’s Industry Innovation Awards Dinner in New York City.
Palmer was educated at the University of Maryland, earning his bachelor’s and master’s degrees there and graduating in the mid-1980s. He returned to Maryland as CIO in 2015, where he immediately took on what became a state mandate in 2018 to report on—and later, in 2021, to incorporate—climate risk into the state’s portfolio.
As home to the Chesapeake Bay and more than 3,100 miles of coastline, the Maryland General Assembly—and the state’s residents generally—have been concerned about climate change and the risk of rising water levels. Palmer took the legislature’s concerns as directing him to ensure that the physical risks affecting the state did not also affect assets in the pension system’s portfolio.
Using his experience and judgement, Palmer—and the team he built—incorporated climate risk management into the system’s evaluation of their managers’ ability to address risk.
With an actuarial return target of 6.8% that the system strives to meet, the portfolio, through the end of fiscal 2024, reported one- and five-year returns that exceeded the goal.
Overall, Palmer built an investment team he believes can address the state’s climate mandate, invest profitably for the pension system and manage a growing portfolio that is expected to reach more than $100 billion, when unfunded liabilities are addressed.
In his letter to the MSRPS board and community accompanying the system’s 2024 annual financial report, Palmer shared that the system’s focus continues to be on long-term returns. To do this, he wrote something that resonates with CIOs everywhere.
“Short-term investment returns are unpredictable, and the system should expect that individual years of strong investment returns will be mixed with years that produce performance that does not meet expectations,” Palmer wrote. “The best way to account for the unknown and achieve long-term objectives is to maintain a balanced and diversified portfolio that is not overly dependent on single economic outcomes.”
Mentored by Mulligan at ASB
Palmer got to public pension fund investing after looking for “real world” experience outside of academia in the 1980s. He earned degrees in economics and later answered a job ad for a position as a “bond analyst.”
He credited the man that hired him in that role, the late Eugene W. Mulligan, as his “mentor, friend and hero” in a tribute Palmer wrote following Mulligan’s death in 2024. Mulligan hired Palmer as a fixed-income-sector specialist at the firm that is now the $30.1 billion asset manager ASB Capital Management.
“Gene hired me when I had zero experience investing bonds and only a tenuous idea what a bond was,” Palmer wrote. “He spent years training me how to be an investor and along the way taught me how to draw the best out of myself and those around me.”
After 20 years at ASB, Palmer spent more than nine years as a director of fixed income and then deputy CIO at the Tennessee Consolidated Retirement System.
When announcing his first day of the retirement chapter of his life on LinkedIn, Palmer praised the “public plan community [as] remarkably open to helping out a new CIO who is trying to figure it out” and even noted that “the industry conveners and reporters do a fantastic job providing the space for productive interaction.”
Now a Mentor Himself
When reviewing the names that came up in our conversations about who to recognize with this year’s award, we heard Palmer described as “the No. 1 influence in my career,” a “good human” and “brilliant.” That made him the choice.
CIO has presented the Lifetime Achievement Award since 2011 to individuals—including asset allocators, asset managers and an academic—whose work in the pension and institutional investing business has protected and benefited the investment resources of pension funds, endowments and foundations around the world.
We have honored people for their innovations—in investing and in operations—their determination and their contributions to the community of the world’s largest investors and those concerned about retirement policy.
Past honorees were recognized for different efforts and varied careers, but one thing they all have in common is the contribution each has made to the broad community of investors and to institutional asset ownership. As we will with Palmer, this award has always recognized people who helped train the up-and-coming talent in the industry, who have given time and attention to solving complex problems independently, who provided service to the industry, and who advanced important ideas.
Previous winners have included (among others) Christopher Ailman, then CIO of the California State Teachers’ Retirement System; Walter Kress, CIO of EY; Robin Diamonte, then CIO of UTC, Thomas “Britt” Harris, then the CIO of the Teacher Retirement System of Texas; Mark Schmid, then the CIO of the University of Chicago; Ash Williams, then the CIO and executive director of the Florida State Board of Administration; and Olivia Mitchell, professor of business economics and public policy, as well as insurance and risk management, at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.