Jacqui Fernley takes the CIO role at Hamilton Wealth Partners

Most advice firms treat the investment function as the thing that proves their worth to a client. Will Hamilton, chief executive and founder of Hamilton Wealth Partners, has decided it is the entry ticket rather than the reason families stay.

“Investment expertise is what gets an advice firm in the door, it is not what holds a family for thirty years,” Hamilton says. “What holds them is the depth of the advice relationship, across structures, succession planning, the family business and the next generation.”

The specialist family wealth advisory firm, founded by Hamilton in 2013, has handed the investment office to arcpoint OCIO. Founding partner Jacqui Fernley takes the chief investment officer role, following a 2026 strategy review that assessed what growing families now need from their adviser.

Fernley was most recently chief investment officer at Mason Stevens, where she led the asset management function and oversaw approximately $9 billion in client capital. Her career has also taken in senior investment roles at Wilson HTM, Magellan Financial Group, JBWere and Colonial First State Global Asset Management.

The process question

Fernley frames the appointment around a transition that many growing practices are in the middle of without having named it. “As an advice practice grows, investment management quietly stops being a portfolio question and becomes a process one,” Fernley says.

That shift is what drives most in-house investment functions past the point where one principal can carry them. Manager research must be documented rather than held in someone’s head. Private markets need a due diligence standard that stands up years later.

The team must review asset allocation on a schedule rather than when markets force the issue. Every decision also has to reach dozens of differently structured client entities in the right order.

None of that is difficult in isolation, and all of it competes for the hours a principal would otherwise spend with families.

Hamilton Wealth Partners has responded by formalising how it makes investment decisions and deepening the analysis behind them. Oversight stays with the firm’s Investment Policy Board, which continues under independent chairmanship and reports to the Advisory Board, and each client’s adviser keeps the suitability decision. Fernley is supported at arcpoint by her wider investment team and its research partnerships.

For Hamilton, the appointment comes down to what he believes clients actually need.

“Our clients do not need more products, they need better decisions made on their behalf and explained properly, and this is the most important appointment we have made.”

Inside the team

The distinction Hamilton draws is between an outsourced provider and an embedded one. “arcpoint OCIO works inside our team rather than at arm’s length from it, so our clients keep the relationship they have always had and gain an investment process built to an institutional standard,” he says.

Fernley makes the same point from the other side, describing an arrangement in which her team sits alongside the firm’s advisers while the client relationship stays with the adviser.

Outsourcing the investment office relocates the governance burden rather than removing it. The Investment Policy Board still owns the decisions, and the advisers still have to position them with their clients.

The arrangement works where the outsourced team is close enough to the practice to know its clients. It thins out where the relationship becomes a quarterly report and a model portfolio. It is also a fixed cost. That is why the model tends to suit firms that have grown past a certain size rather than those still building one.

Fernley will feature across the firm’s investment publications, client events and presentations, including its monthly Investor Insights. Hamilton Wealth Partners will also introduce her to clients at dinners in Melbourne and Sydney in November.