Merely a year after Scott Evans retired from anaging nearly $500 billion at TIAA-CREF, he says a sense of civic duty led him to the
CIO role overseeing New York City’s $181 billion
New York City Employees’ Retirement System
(NYCERS).
It’s a common theme in hero movies to bring
the champion out for one last big match. In some
ways, that’s just what Scott Evans did when he
came out of retirement to become CIO of the
retirement system. “I felt compelled by civic duty
to get involved in New York. I thought there were
a lot of ways that I could make a positive contribution,” Evans tells CIO.
New York’s pension program is an unwieldy
maze of investments. Evans oversees five separate
plans that make up the retirement system, each
with a unique constituency and custom processes.
His mission since taking on the role in 2014 has
been to untangle the pension and modernize it
to provide plan participants with functionality
common to other plans. “The system in New York
was burdened in some ways by complexity. It grew
unevenly over time, and so it lacked some function-
ality that is common in other retirement systems,”
Evans explains. “We’ve been able to add that func-
tionality and improve services for participants. We
spent a lot of time on standardization of protocols,
forms, and process—that’s been transformative.”
Evans credits City Comptroller Scott
Stringer and the pension staff with much of the
heavy lifting. He says that having colleagues that
are career public servants and deeply invested in
the security of the pension system meant everyone
got behind the effort to make things better for
participants. Working closely with career staff also
provided valuable insights into how the retirement
system developed over time, and how it could be
improved with minimal disruption.
Much of Evans’ transformation playbook was
crafted during his time at TIAA. While there, he
refined his approach to manager selection and
investment governance. At N YCERS, he’s adapted
those lessons for a public plan, filling out the staff on
the investment team and creating dedicated teams
from existing managers to handle administrative
tasks like invoicing and documents management.
Evans tells CIO that pension leaders have to be
willing to run their organizations like a business if
they want to innovate—looking for opportunities
to improve service delivery and reduce overhead.
“Broadly, our approach to pensions over the past
20 years has included a lot of steps backward, and
individuals have ended up in a variety of vehicles
that don’t necessarily serve them well,” he says. “I
think as an industry, we have to think more about
optimal solutions for individuals.”
When asked about what he sees as an optimal
solution, Evans is philosophical. After decades in
this industry, he says that ultimately, education
is going to be the most critical component of any
strategy, because investors must be willing to overcome behavioral bias, regardless of what retirement vehicle they use. “People have to be willing
to insure their own longevity,” he contends. “One
of the biggest risks people face is that they could
outlive their savings. A pension is an insurance
policy in a way, but people don’t spend on that
insurance for a host of reasons. I’ve been working
on this for my whole career, and people don’t want
to do it. We have to figure out how to solve for
that.” —Bailey McCann
Washington State
Investment Board
Gary Bruebaker
California Public
Employees' Retirement
System
Ted Eliopoulos
New York State Common
Retirement Fund
Vicki Fuller
Florida State Board of
Administration
Ashbel (Ash) Williams
New York City
Retirement System
Scott Evans, Deputy Comptroller for Asset Management and CIO (New York, New York)
