Marc Levine has served as Chairman of the Illinois State Board of Investment (ISBI) since 2015. He is a Certified Public Accountant with over 25 years of investment experience and was the founding principal of Chicago Asset Funding LLC.
S&P DJI: Tell us a bit about ISBI, your role there, the participants you serve, and ISBI’s investment philosophy.
Marc: The Illinois State Board of Investment (ISBI) manages assets on behalf of more than 140,000 state employees. ISBI manages the Defined Benefit (DB) assets of the State Employees’ Retirement System, the General Assembly Retirement System, the Judges’ Retirement System of Illinois, and the Illinois Power Agency. The DB plan has about USD 18 billion in assets. We also manage the State of Illinois Deferred Compensation (DC) Plan, which has about USD 4 billion in assets. The choices in the DC plan are made by the employees directly and there’s no employer match.
I spent my life in the financial markets. I was an investment banker and I owned my own boutique financial firm. I believe that simple is better, and that’s our approach at ISBI too.
In my role as Chairman, I work with our board to make sure we’re working toward our goal of returning long-term value to our beneficiaries. That means keeping costs low and making sure that our target allocations are designed to meet our risk-adjusted return goals. We believe that adhering to a simple, diverse, strategic asset allocation plan over the long term is what drives returns.
