Glenn Warden, CIO and Principal at Bahl & Gaynor

WHAT WE DO:  

“Bahl & Gaynor is a private investment firm and our goal is to always be private, never public. We are one hundred percent employee-owned; all of the portfolio managers and investment professionals who work here, own the company, and we find that this employee ownership is the best value for our clients. It is a hard thing to maintain with the transitions a firm faces as people age and retire, but we’ve put some things in place to ensure that we remain employee-owned and can continue to provide that best client experience. We’re a portfolio management company with a niche in the industry – we invest in dividend-paying and growing stocks. Some companies try to offer all types of products and services, but we feel that our strategy of doing one thing and doing it well works for all our clients, whether an institution or a private client, our slow and steady strategy wins the race in the long run. We are one of the top players in town and in the country; we have clients in all fifty states, but we are headquartered in Cincinnati.

Bahl & Gaynor has a big outsourcing model. Even though we’re a small company, we are regulated by the SEC, which mandates that we must do all the same things the bigger investment companies do; follow all the same guidelines, facilitate all the same security procedures and standards. So we have a lot of technologies in place, more servers and more applications than people in fact. One of my goals is to use technology to create efficiencies in order to not hire more people. We have been able to grow our assets under management and have not had to add people, and we have relied heavily on technology to help us do this. Industry-wide the trend I see is many more businesses going toward outsourcing; getting rid of IT departments, or IT departments using IT vendors. There is no less IT in business, in fact there is more and more reliance on IT and technology, but that reliance is going to the vendors, not internal IT departments.”

How do you stay abreast of what your competitors are doing in the IT space? 

“From an IT perspective, I really don’t see any competition at all, in fact I see our competitors as assets. I know just about all of them and have become friends with many of them. We go out to lunch or get coffee and we talk and brainstorm to figure out things that will help both of us. There are only twenty to thirty investment firms in town, and among them, there are only a handful of private firms who have the technologies that compare to what we’re doing, so we are a pretty tight-knit group and we try to help each other out. None of us want to see any of the others on the front page of the paper because they were hacked. That would create a lot of fear and inquiry among all our clients.  After 27 years, Bahl & Gaynor is now a very mature company and one of the most technologically advanced, so if anything, I think our competitors want to learn what they can from watching what products we are buying, what projects we are doing and how we are innovating with technology.”