Why CITs Are Winning in Retirement | Val Ferrara

DoubleLine Relationship Manager Stephen Dopp welcomes Val Ferrara, known industrywide as the Queen of CITs, to the latest episode of The Glide Path to discuss her nearly two-decade career in the collective investment trust (CIT) industry. Ms. Ferrara details her journey from the iShares team implementing ETFs in 401(k) plans and growing Wilmington Trust’s CIT assets to well over $300 billion to launching her consultancy earlier this year. She makes the case that CITs have surpassed mutual funds as the dominant asset vehicle in retirement plans due to fee flexibility, negotiating power and robust fiduciary oversight.

The conversation turns to where CITs may be headed next, including the industry conversation around delivering private assets into defined contribution plans. Ms. Ferrara draws a useful parallel to stable value, a category that has quietly managed a similar liquidity mismatch for decades, as a template for how private assets might find their place in retirement portfolios. The episode closes with Ms. Ferrara sharing the story behind her new book, written after completing a personal goal of running a half-marathon on every continent and visiting all seven wonders of the world.

Speaker Bio:
Val Ferrara is the founder of Queen of CITs, LLC, an independent consultancy that helps asset managers expand and deepen their relationships in the retirement advisor-sold market — mapping the CIT competitive landscape and pricing strategy, managing RFP processes with third-party trustees, navigating Declarations of Trust and crafting CUSIP eligibility requirements, delivering ERISA and CIT education, and sharpening asset managers' sales and marketing collateral. She maintains a national network across retirement aggregator CIOs, investment committees, and influential plan advisors — relationships that surface market intelligence and product feedback for the managers she works with.

Val has nearly twenty years in the defined contribution market. At Great Gray Trust Company, formerly Wilmington Trust, she helped pioneer the distribution team covering national sales as the firm's sub-advised CIT business grew from $10 billion to $190 billion over nine years, expanding from 10 asset managers to more than 70. She later served as Director of Sales at SEI, where she helped boutique asset managers understand the retirement market. Earlier in her career she spent seven years on BlackRock's defined contribution distribution team, spanning sales across their CIT, ETF, and mutual fund business.

Val holds a registered trademark, Fearless with Positive Energy® — a mantra she promotes carrying into and out of every room. She is the author of 7 Life Lessons + 1: Inspirational Reflections After Traveling the Seven Wonders of the World, available on Amazon, written with thought-provoking questions meant to engage both the reader and listener.
When she's not making CITs reign, Val enjoys traveling, yoga, and Broadway. She has run a half-marathon on every continent and explored the Seven Wonders of the World; her next adventure is hiking every U.S. National Park — 17 down, many more to go.