The ETF market has grown into one of the most widely used investment vehicles in the world. Driven by demand from individual investors seeking flexible, low-cost options and major institutions looking for efficient portfolio building blocks, the competition to deliver smarter, more purposeful solutions is intensifying.
For decades, Russell Investments has built its reputation as a "manager of managers," coordinating specialist external managers alongside its own proprietary strategies to help the world's largest pension funds and endowments achieve genuine diversification. Now, the firm is applying that same institutional discipline to the ETF market.
That heritage also underlies Russell's position as a leading provider of outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) services, a model in which institutions delegate investment decision-making to an external manager. As larger organisations increasingly adopt OCIO, ETFs have become a natural and efficient building block within those mandates, valued for their liquidity, transparency, and flexibility across a range of portfolio structures. Russell's experience managing complex, multi-asset institutional portfolios informs directly how the firm deploys ETFs within that framework.
"The biggest gap in the ETF space is between thinking about portfolio construction and coming in with a product lens. That's the one I expect will get filled in the next five years."
— Zach Buchwald, CEO and Chairman, Russell Investments
Rather than relying exclusively on in-house strategies, Russell collaborates with external managers who specialise in unique, hard-to-replicate approaches, combining that external expertise with its own quantitative research. The result is a construction-first model that addresses one of the most persistent challenges in the ETF space: the gap between selecting products and building portfolios. Multi-manager thinking, once the exclusive domain of large institutional investors, can now be packaged into a portable, cost-effective form accessible to a much wider range of advisers and their clients.
About ETF Innovators
ETF Innovators is a short-form video series hosted by Valerie Grimba, Director, Global ETF Strategy, that spotlights how RBC clients are driving innovation in ETFs. The series tracks the evolution of the global ETF landscape and spotlights the leaders, ideas, and strategies powering the next wave of performance.
