This former Philadelphia official now runs a multibillion-dollar investment business

Tina Byles Williams has built one of the largest Black-owned-and-operated asset-management companies in the 30 years since she left her job as chief investment officer for the city’s pension plan.

“I believe in America’s possibility because I live it,” Byles Williams, a Harvard graduate and Jamaican immigrant, told a crowd of 50 professionals at the city’s Union League last month.

She was joined on the dais by board members of her company, Center City-based Xponance Inc., which employs a total of 45, at its main office in Center City, and its stock and bond investment office in Durham, N.C. Byles Williams led a discussion titled “The American Dream: What Now?” exploring whether a latter-day immigrant or first-generation graduate with a solid U.S. education but few initial contacts could hope to build an investment company, after decades of rapid change and consolidation in the asset-management business.

Xponance oversees $20 billion in clients’ money, much of it for public pension plans. That includes $234 million in foreign stocks it selects for the Pennsylvania State Employees’ Retirement System (SERS), which invests to help fund pensions for more than 200,000 state troopers, social workers, state-college staff, corrections officers, lawmakers, and other state workers and retirees.

Byles Williams (then known as Tina Poitevien) was recruited to Philadelphia by then-city finance officer Betsy Reveal. She served as chief investment officer, selecting pension investments, first for the Philadelphia Gas Works starting in 1988, then for the city’s underfunded pension system under Mayor W. Wilson Goode, starting in 1991.

At the time, “you could count on one hand — and not use all your fingers — all the people of color and women who ran investments,” Byles Williams told the Union League gathering. She recalled some of the resistance to her appointment: The then-head of the city Fraternal Order of Police was quoted in publications in 1990 claiming she would “have the pension fund heading to the Rastafarians” and sued in a failed attempt to block her hiring.

Byles Williams left city government in 1994 for the private sector, as cofounder of a short-lived New Orleans investment firm. She was back in Philadelphia two years later to set up Fiduciary Investment Solutions (FIS), Xponance’s predecessor.

Under Mayor John Street in 2003, FIS was hired to advise the city pension system. Byles Williams had donated to Street’s campaign, a point raised by critics who wanted the city to stay with a larger, rival firm. “It is common for FIS and other firms to be solicited for political contributions,” a lawyer for FIS told The Inquirer at the time. Indeed, other money managers routinely contributed to Pennsylvania politicians of both parties. The practice was curtailed by the SEC in a 2010 policy change.

By 2007, three of the nation’s largest financial firms were run by Black men — Stanley O’Neill at Merrill Lynch, Kenneth Chenault at American Express, Franklin Raines at Fannie Mae. Another Black CEO, Richard Parsons of media giant Time Warner, chaired the board at banking and insurance leader Citigroup.

Today none of the 25 most valuable U.S financial companies are run by Black CEOs. While Byles Williams’ firm has grown, other Black-run investment management firms are scarce and remain modest in size. According to data cited by Xponance, only around 1.4% of pension plan dollars and other institutional assets are invested by “diverse and women-owned firms.”

The city pension board in 2013, during Mayor Michael Nutter’s second term, ended contracts with FIS and another firm to recommend emerging-investment managers, citing underperformance of the small managers they hired. But FIS continued to grow nationally. In May 2018, FIS acquired another Black-run firm, Durham, N.C.-based Piedmont Investment Advisers LLC, doubling its assets to around $10 billion. It has doubled again, gaining clients as market values rose.

In 2018, FIS was hired by SERS, with support from SERS trustee Sen. Vincent Hughes (D., Philadelphia), to invest $200 million in minority-, women- and other diverse-manager investment funds that invest in foreign stocks, under a 2017 state policy that “encourages the use of diverse investment managers ... within the bounds of financial and fiduciary prudence.”

Byles Williams’ company has since changed its name to Xponance. An affiliate, Xponance Alternative Solutions, manages investments in diverse private-investment firms.

Byles Williams told the Union League crowd that she still believes in the American dream, the “fundamental premise” that “with focus, hard work, and a little bit of luck” an ambitious immigrant or native can make contacts and rise to build a career, an institution, a family with community concerns and larger aspirations.

Born in Jamaica, she headed to New York at 18 to study at New York University, armed with a robust “Jamaican upbringing,” a family and community attitude that “whatever dire circumstances you find yourself in, you can find a way to get over them.” She earned her master’s at Harvard University, and worked on Wall Street before Reveal, a Harvard dean whom Mayor Goode appointed as Philadelphia’s finance director, recruited her as an investment officer.

She worries that her own children, and many of their contemporaries, “don’t think they have the opportunity that I had.” Byles Williams is dismayed that many young people tell her they are daunted by the costs of college and health care, and the challenge of saving money. Further dreams of building a business in a potentially lucrative but relentlessly competitive field like asset management seem still more distant: “That is not something they think is in the cards for them.”

She hailed the concept of “mutualism,” community cooperation and collective action, exemplified by the early labor union movement and other social movements, to secure changes such as greater access to education and limits on working hours. Byles Williams considers mutual support a precursor of participation in capitalist society by people who don’t start out wealthy.

But she has seen mutualism erode since she arrived in Philadelphia 30 years ago, leaving many behind. “We’ve gotten to this place where we think of each other as economic units, rather than human beings,” she said.

Noting the drop in birthrates among U.S.-born people, Byles Williams said Americans should welcome immigration to bolster the workforce. She said political candidates demonizing Haitian workers is “an act of political malpractice, on both sides.” A growing economy requires young workers’ talents and tax payments. “Immigrants are filling the jobs that employers have not been able to fill.”

According to SERS, Xponance as of March 31 invested around $235 million of the plan’s $30 billion in assets. The firm collected fees totaling $1.7 million in each of 2023 and 2022. That works out to about seven-tenths of a cent for every dollar invested, in line with other stock-picking firms, which generally charge far more than passive stock-index funds. (An Xponance spokesperson noted this cost includes fees paid to smaller managers, along with administrative costs.)

According to SERS’s March and June 2024 performance reports, Xponance produced more than double the returns of the benchmark Morgan Stanley MSCI index of non-U.S. small-cap stocks so far in calendar-year 2024, and also beat the index over the most recent 12 months, though it trailed over the previous three- and five-year periods, after deducting expenses.

The fund’s returns will vary compared to other investments, but “diversification works well in the long term,” Xponance said in a statement.