Retirement Industry People Moves

Cafaro Greenleaf (CG), an advisory firm for corporate and public retirement plans, hired Joe Schildhauer to head its Houston, Texas office. 

Schildhauer will work with retirement plan participants and assist plan sponsors in implementing the highest level of fiduciary standards, focusing on key aspects of retirement plans such as fee transparency, plan design, education and monitoring. 

Schildhauer is a co-founder of Wealth Benefit Advisors, a Houston-based investment consulting firm specializing in investment advisory and fiduciary consulting services to qualified retirement plans, foundations, and trusts. 

He is an Investment Advisor Representative, holds a Series 65 license, and has earned the Accredited Investment Fiduciary Analyst (AIFA) designation awarded by the Center for Fiduciary Studies. Schildhauer earned a BA in Business Administration from Kansas State University, as well as CLU, ChFC and REBC designations from The American College. 

Hooker & Holcombe, a regional provider of employer-based actuarial, investment advisory and retirement plan consulting, announced the addition of Kathryn “Kate” Pizzi as a consultant within the firm’s investment advisory group.  

She will be responsible for managing client relationships in addition to projects within the sales, research and management areas of the firm. Pizzi is a former employee of Hooker & Holcombe, serving as a senior actuarial analyst more than 10 years ago. 

She has more than 16 years of experience serving the actuarial and investment advisory needs of both public and private institutional clients, with the past eight years focused on investment-grade fixed income investing.            

She was previously with Prime Advisors, Inc., serving most recently as senior investment strategist and fixed income portfolio manager, where she managed more than $2 billion in investment-grade fixed income assets. 

Pizzi graduated magna cum laude from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in mathematics and economics.  She is a member of the American Academy of Actuaries, an Associate of the Society of Actuaries, and is currently a Level 3 Candidate for the Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) designation. 

SageView Advisory Group, an independent retirement consulting firm, hired Ann Cheu as Retirement Plan Consultant. 

Cheu joins the Woodside, California, office and fellow team members including Bob Patton, David Shnapek and William Posch. 

With more than 16 years in the retirement plan industry, Cheu has a wide range of experience in retirement plan design with a specific focus in managing plan costs, fiduciary oversight and strategic plan design. She especially enjoys on-boarding new clients and considers herself an extension of the human resource and finance teams she’s fortunate to serve. 

Cheu began her career at Mercer Investment Consulting in Los Angeles and after six years, moved north to launch the San Francisco practice. Most recently, she was a managing consultant at Precept Advisory Group where she partnered with many Bay Area and Silicon Valley plan sponsors to help them create and manage competitive and cost-effective retirement plan solutions that integrate with each company’s total compensation strategies.  

Prudential Fixed Income’s Global Head of Product Management and Distribution Peter Cordrey will be retiring in the fourth quarter of 2016 after a 20-year career with the firm. 

The firm announced that Bas NieuweWeme joined Prudential Fixed Income effective May 9, 2016, as a managing director where he will lead the firm’s global client service, consultant relations, distribution, liability-driven investing, and marketing teams. NieuweWeme will report to Michael Lillard, head of Prudential Fixed Income. Prudential Fixed Income is a part of PGIM, the global investment management businesses of Prudential Financial, Inc. 

NieuweWeme was most recently the head of Institutional Distribution at Voya Investment Management, where he oversaw global sales, consultant relations, RFPs, relationship management, and client service and was a member of the firm’s management committee. Previous roles during his 16-year tenure at Voya include head of Institutional Sales and Relationship Management for ING U.S. Investment Management and vice president of Global Marketing and Distribution for ING Investment Management. 

NieuweWeme received a law degree from the Amsterdam School of Law with a specialization in tax law and an Executive MBA at the New York University Stern School of Business. 

Student Loan Genius, an Austin-based student loan benefits provider, announced that Henry Yoshida, Honest Dollar co-founder, has joined its team as the vice president of partnerships and product strategy. 

Yoshida brings more than 14 years of experience aiding companies with the development of benefits solutions that help employees improve their financial picture. 

Yoshida will lead efforts to expand and enhance the fintech startup’s collaboration with partners like Prudential Financial. In March of 2016, Prudential announced it will help bring Student Loan Genius’ platform to the four million retirement plan participants whose companies opt-in. 

Yoshida will work closely with the Prudential team, customers and other partners to help the company continue to innovate through services like its 401(k) contribution feature, which allows employees to grow retirement funds by paying off their student loans. 

Global value investor Abhay Deshpande launched Centerstone Investors, LLC an employee-owned asset management firm headquartered in New York.  

Previously, Deshpande was a portfolio manager at First Eagle Investment Management. Centerstone will initially offer two value-oriented strategies to retail and institutional investors. 

The two risk-managed strategies are available in mutual fund and institutional separate account vehicles and will be managed by Deshpande, who serves as chief investment officer of Centerstone, along with an investment team averaging 15 years of investment management experience. The strategies include the Centerstone global multi-asset strategy, focused on investing in both U.S. domestic and foreign assets and employed by the Centerstone Investors Fund (CENTX). The related strategy, the Centerstone international strategy, is focused on investing in markets outside the U.S. and is utilized by the Centerstone International Fund (CINTX). 

The strategies will be managed according to Centerstone’s operating principles, which govern the firm’s approach to investing in what it believes are undervalued assets to potentially derive value for clients over a long-term investment horizon, while seeking to protect against the risk of loss of principal. 

Prior to his 15-year tenure at First Eagle, Deshpande served as an investment analyst for Harris Associates’ Oakmark International Fund and Oakmark International Small Cap Fund. He spent his early investing career as an analyst for Morningstar and Conservative Asset Management, the latter a Kentucky-based boutique investment adviser. 

For more information about Centerstone Investors, visit www.centerstoneinv.com.