Prime Capital hires Glenmede veteran to open endowment unit

Prime Capital Financial has hired Mark Hays away from Glenmede to open a dedicated endowments and foundations practice aimed at family foundations, museums, schools, health-focused foundations and nonprofit endowments with $5 million to $250 million in assets. InvestmentNews reported the appointment. What the Overland Park, Kansas RIA is buying with Hays is institutional credibility more than client assets, the thing it will need to walk into a family foundation board meeting and present OCIO, impact strategy and governance as its own business.

Hays spent nearly seven years at Glenmede, where he built that firm's mission-aligned investing business and worked with endowments, foundations, families and institutions on portfolio and impact questions; earlier stops at Cambridge Associates and J.P. Morgan Asset Management round out close to two decades in institutional and values-based investing. Prime Capital brings scale to the hire: $39.1 billion in regulatory AUM across 55,376 accounts and 60 advisors, with 460 employees on the payroll.

Hays frames the move in mission language, saying his North Star has been using capital to create lasting impact and that he was drawn by the quality of Prime's people, its entrepreneurial culture and the opportunity to build something distinctive for mission-driven organizations. It is the kind of line a foundation board wants to hear from its OCIO provider.

Behind that pitch is a three-part platform: institutional investment management and OCIO services spanning asset allocation, manager selection, risk analysis and reporting; impact strategy that keeps portfolios and grantmaking aligned with purpose while preserving fiduciary duty; and governance advisory aimed at strengthening boards, investment committees and philanthropic operations. Chief executive Glenn Spencer says Prime had already been building that capability across its platform and that Hays gives the firm the leadership to pull it together and scale; the outside hire closes the gap between having centralized resources and running an institutional practice.

The sequencing points to a build path. Hays starts by drawing on Prime's existing resources, dedicated staff arrive this fall, and the team is scheduled to keep growing into 2027, a build schedule that assembles a unit around a leader rather than buying one at a premium.

The announcement carries no mention of a client book, and Prime has not framed this as a block purchase of assets. The firm is buying the ability to stand in front of a family foundation or a museum and present institutional OCIO, impact strategy and governance as its own practice, a cheaper shortcut than building a nonprofit business development effort from scratch or buying a standalone OCIO shop. It arrives, however, with fewer revenue guarantees.

Cerulli Associates projects the OCIO industry will roughly double from more than $3.3 trillion at the end of 2024 to $5.6 trillion by 2029, with nearly $1.3 trillion of that increase coming from institutions adopting the model for the first time. Prime argues the $5 million-to-$250 million band is exactly where the squeeze is being felt—organizations with market complexity, governance obligations and reporting demands that outrun the staff they can afford.

Size is what gives the pitch its logic. A $10 million foundation's governance burden does not shrink because its balance sheet is small, but its budget for staff and consultants does; the OCIO model exists to fill that gap, and Prime is betting it can sell the fix at a price small endowments can pay.

Firms increasingly use executive recruiting as a form of product development, hiring the leader who can build a line faster than the internal bench could. Carson hired Osaic's Peterson to lead its independent channel, a distribution bet built around one executive's reach. Prime is running the same play on the institutional side.

The risk is the bench question. A practice organized around one executive's reputation is fragile until the people behind him give it independent standing, and the hires that arrive this fall, along with the team assembled through 2027, will be the concrete evidence. Adding practitioners who can deliver impact and governance work to a $6 million foundation is what turns this hire into a franchise; headcount will show whether Prime has built one long before the Cerulli totals do.