Wayne Wicker is the Senior VP and CIO of ICMA Retirement Corporation, an asset manager that oversees $50 billion across more than a million retirement accounts of City and County public sector employees throughout the country. Before joining ICMA-RC in 2004, Wayne had a distinguished career as an allocator and manager, starting as an allocator at the corporate pension fund of Dayton Hudson (now Target Corporation) in the 1980s and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute endowment in the mid-1990s, after which he moved to direct investing in 1998, managing a portfolio of large cap growth equities for seven years at Cadence Capital Management.

Our conversation covers Wayne’s career path, multi-asset investing, and the ins and outs of managing defined contribution plans as a fiduciary and as a business. We discuss asset allocation strategies, regulatory limitations, stable value products, retirement shortfall risks, active vs. passive on large pools of capital, and managing internal and external teams.

This episode took place at a recent Institutional Investor conference for Corporate Funds and Insurance Portfolios, with the core discussion about ICMA-RC occurring in front of a live audience.