CIBC GAM builds its institutional edge on connectivity

At CIBC Global Asset Management™ (CIBC GAM), several senior leaders emphasize the firm's competitive edge lies not in any single fund or strategy but in the connective tissue that links every part of their organization, including investment teams, capital markets, corporate bankers and more, to drive operational excellence under one enterprise mindset.

Julia Moynihan, managing director, business development and connectivity at CIBC GAM, emphasized that institutional clients aren’t looking for a single product off a shelf; they need a partner who understands financing, capital, governance and risk as interconnected parts of a larger puzzle.

“It's about the whole ecosystem. It's financing. It's capital. It's knowing the governance and the risk piece,” says Moynihan. “We can bring the whole bank to the problems that exist. It’s not only about a single product; it's not about something that's off the shelf. It really is being that solution provider.”

Private credit and the triple-layer risk check

Meriç Koksal, managing director and head of product, underscores the firm’s product development work illustrates how connectivity translates into a unique solution for clients. As an example, CIBC GAM's private credit offering draws on origination from commercial banking in Canada and the US, leverage from capital markets, and risk oversight from commercial banking, asset management and firm-wide risk management - a structure she described as a “triple-layer risk check.”

“This is not a risk transfer per se. The bank still owns the loan. It has gone through the risk management and approval process within commercial banking. It has gone through the asset management due diligence, as well as the firm’s overall risk management," she explains. “The product that we envisioned would not be possible in a firm this size without that level of connectivity.”

According to Moynihan, the work of assembling the right internal expertise happens seamlessly, without the client feeling any impact. Moynihan connects CIBC GAM colleagues with trading desks, credit groups and fund finance teams so they arrive at client meetings with sharper context, an understanding of how other institutional investors are approaching similar challenges and where CIBC GAM can offer something different.

Koksal believes serving sophisticated institutional clients forces a higher operational standard across the entire firm, one that ultimately benefits wealth and retail clients as well. The due diligence process institutional investors demand is granular and unforgiving, and meeting it consistently keeps the organization sharp.

Building infrastructure for nonlinear strategies

The immediate priority is building out the infrastructure to support nonlinear strategies. Enhanced execution ability including leverage, derivatives, over-the-counter trading, short selling, just to name a few, moves the firm well beyond buying and selling listed securities into a more complex execution environment where best execution still holds.

“We’re broadening our counterparty reach. We're consistently expanding our toolbox, which will allow us to execute innovative products for the right to win the business,” says Koksal.

David Wong, group chief investment officer and managing director at CIBC GAM, agrees that connectivity without investment substance is hollow, particularly as his investment philosophy starts with the client's need and not only CIBC GAM's product shelf.

“Our approach to investment management really is not force-fitting solutions. Our approach is to embrace our clients' challenges, what they're bringing to us, and then trying to design solutions that address those,” he says. “It starts with having the right set of capabilities.”

The platform behind that approach has expanded considerably, Wong notes, as traditional equity and fixed income capabilities now sit alongside private credit - brought into CIBC GAM in 2025. The firm’s Total Investment Solutions team is well positioned to compete for outsourced CIO mandates with the scale and breadth of a full-service money manager that also has external manager partnerships to drive desired outcomes, performance, and value in a total portfolio. Quantitative strategies developed over the past decade can generate returns in a market where index concentration has made excess performance harder to capture.

Wong also flags the forward-looking case for non-directional strategies, arguing that after 15 years of above-average equity returns, mean reversion makes market-beta-independent approaches essential for the next decade. Delivering on any of it, though, requires more than investment skill.

“It's more than the investment capability, it's the whole solutioning set that we have, which touches on many different teams, not just the investment team, but the product team, the operations team,” he says.

A large defined benefit pension plan's move to CIBC GAM earlier this year added another layer of solutioning complexity. Wong underscored the pension plan gains immediate advantages in fee negotiation, operational infrastructure and reporting, efficiencies that would have been harder to achieve in isolation.

“All of the operational arrangements, reporting, can be scaled up under that $431 billion* asset manager,” Wong says, adding the integration also strengthens CIBC GAM's Total Investment Solutions team, which already manages assets and acts as an asset owner on a pool well north of $100 billion.

Quantitative tools sharpen active management

Wong also points to quantitative portfolio construction as one area where internal collaboration has produced measurable results. He notes the firm spent the better part of a decade developing quant capabilities that sit alongside fundamental research, not to replace conviction-based stock picking but to expose risks portfolio managers may not see.

“In the earliest versions of this, almost a decade ago, there was a little bit of surprise around just how much of the portfolio wasn't idiosyncratic stock picking risk, but how much was embedded in factor exposure that wasn't necessarily intended,” he said.

Wong believes the payoff has been tangible in a period where concentrated equity markets have punished managers with unintended factor tilts.

“We haven't faced some of those same challenges despite having a lot of the same active management precepts around quality stocks, for example,” he added.

Connectivity as operating discipline

Meanwhile, Eric Belanger, group head at CIBC Wealth Management, suggests the needs of Canadian institutional investors have always carried complexity, but the current environment has raised the bar across public and private markets, portfolio implementation, liquidity management and risk oversight.

Rather than waiting for those demands to arrive, CIBC GAM has focused on strengthening internal connections between investment teams so client objectives can be assessed collectively.

“That positions us to be more proactive. Building the right products, capabilities and operating discipline our clients need to navigate different market environments and not simply responding to them,” he says.

In practice, a globally connected platform means research and investment perspectives flow across teams and geographies – not to override local expertise but to reinforce it with broader scale. Yet, CIBC GAM emphasizes that forward-looking posture doesn’t mean discarding what has worked.

“We preserve what has earned our clients’ trust over decades: investment discipline, fiduciary responsibility, operational excellence, and a long-term commitment to partnership,” says Belanger. “What evolves is how we bridge those strengths together and deliver them. Through our structure, technology, processes and connectivity.”

*As of June 30, 2026, CIBC GAM managed C$431 billion in assets under management.

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The views expressed in this material are the views of CIBC Global Asset Management., as of September 16, 2026 unless otherwise indicated, and are subject to change at any time. ®/™The CIBC logo and “CIBC Global Asset Management” are trademarks of CIBC, used under license. CIBC Global Asset Management is a brand name under which CIBC Asset Management Inc. operates.