MutualFundWire.com: A $41B-AUM Fund Firm Expands a Behavioral Science Alliance

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Thursday, October 13, 2022

A $41B-AUM Fund Firm Expands a Behavioral Science Alliance

The folks at a $40.6-billion-AUM (as of June 30) fund firm are teaming up with a familiar behavioral science ally to power a new fund.

Kristof Marius Gleich
Harbor Capital Advisors, Inc.
President, Chief Investment Officer

Today, Kristof Gleich, president and chief investment officer of Harbor Capital Advisors, Inc. [profile], and Dan Ariely, co-founder of Irrational Capital, unveiled the launch of the Harbor Corporate Culture ETF (HAPI on the NYSE Arca, Inc.). The passively managed fund is designed to track the CIBC Human Capital Index (which is built around the "Human Capital Factor," which was developed by Irrational Capital via corporate culture scoring).

HAPI is a series of the Harbor ETF Trust, comes with an expense ratio of 36 basis points, and its inception date was yesterday. Harbor serves as the new fund's investment advisor, Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) as the fund's index provider, and Stephen Cook (managing director of ETFs at Harbor) and James Erceg (executive vice president and head of product) as PMs.

The launch of HAPI comes about eight months after the Harbor and Irrational Capital folks teamed up to launch HAPY, another corporate culture ETF. That first fund held $6.338 million in AUM as of today.

"We continue to see strong investor demand in the field of human capital investing," Gleich states. "HAPI provids investors with more options to access the Human Capital Factor, which we believe is the most comprehensive measure of employee motivation, and a differentiated investment factor linked to future equity performance. We look forward to finding innovative ways to apply the Human Capital Factor to a myrid of investment strategies in the future."

Ariely lauds Harbor for being "on the leading edge of developing products that provide access to this new factor," namely the connection between corporate culture, employee motivation, and financial performance.

"We're delighted to expand our partnership with the team at Harbor Capital to deliver further evidence that doing the right thing pays and is strongly linked to future investment performance," Ariely states.

The new fund's other service providers include: Ernst & Young LLP as independent accounting firm; Foreside Fund Services, LLC as distributor; and State Street Bank and Trust Company as custodian, dividend disbursing agent, and transfer agent.

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