Matthew Scanlan’s Biography
Matthew Scanlan is an investment executive with 40+ years of CEO-level experience across indexing, quantitative, active, and private equity strategies. He currently serves as Strategic Operating Partner at Valeas Capital Partners, a role he assumed in 2024 to advise the firm and its portfolio companies in the financial services vertical.
Scanlan began his career in Chicago at O’Connor & Company and then as a Vice President and Senior Portfolio Manager in the Structured Equity Group at The Northern Trust Company. He then spent fourteen years (1996–2009) at Barclays Global Investors (BGI), where he served as Managing Director and CEO of the Americas institutional business, managing 80 professionals across San Francisco, Boston, Chicago, Montreal, Toronto, Brazil, and Mexico City. He co-authored the award-winning article “Five Myths About Fees” (Journal of Portfolio Management, 2006) and testified before the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor in 2007 regarding the 401(k) Fair Disclosure for Retirement Security Act.
In 2009 Scanlan left BGI to become President and CEO of Renaissance Institutional Management, the institutional business of Renaissance Technologies in New York, reporting directly to James Simons. In 2009 he also advised the U.S. Department of Labor’s ERISA Advisory Council on retirement security. In January 2012 he was appointed CEO and Chief Investment Officer of RS Investments, a $20 billion San Francisco asset manager majority-owned by Guardian Life Insurance. He led the firm’s expansion into emerging markets and oversaw its 2015 acquisition by Victory Capital.
Following RS Investments, Scanlan served as an Operating Executive at Golden Gate Capital (2016–2024), focused on financial services investments. In 2024 he joined Valeas Capital Partners as Strategic Operating Partner. He currently serves on the boards of Adams Street Partners (since 2018) and Exos Financial Group.
Scanlan is a CFA charterholder and served on the CFA Institute’s Board of Governors, chaired its Executive Advisory Board, and served on its candidate curriculum committee advisory board. He is the 2006 recipient of the CFA Institute’s C. Stewart Sheppard Award for contributions to investor education and the 2007 winner of the Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award for Best Article in the Journal of Portfolio Management. He earned a master’s degree in management from the J.L. Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University and a Bachelor of Science - Phi Beta Kappa, Magna Cum Laude - from the University of Southern California.