Pushing the limit

It's 3am and Jacqueline Fernley is still at her desk, vibe coding with the help of AI. Until recently, she had never written a line of code in her life.

"The joy is being able to test and create and get curious yourself, in a world where you can do it yourself, that's what I find most exciting about it... It's remarkably creative," Fernley says.

Three decades into her investment career, she says the more senior an executive becomes, the less time they spend on the tools and on Excel spreadsheets. Now, she can do it all herself.

"The 30 years' frame of reference and the lived experience gives you a knowledge in your head that you can see what [the AI] is doing, and you go, 'No, no, no! Don't do it that way. Do it this way. Think about that,'" she says.

Learning to code is not the biggest leap she has taken lately. In February, Fernley launched arcpoint OCIO, which provides wealth businesses outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) services.

An outsourced, or fractional, chief investment officer service gives a business access to a chief investment officer, their investment strategy and their team on a part-time basis. Fernley sees it as a way of the future.

"In a world where so many other industry sectors are being disrupted, the most important thing you can do is be in the channel that is actually in growth," she says.

"When you've got a wind behind your back, in any investment, in any company, that's easier."

The demand, coupled with two clients ready to follow her, made the decision for her.

"I just had this confluence of events where the obvious thing was to step into that opportunity, and so I did," she says.

Her career started in 1996 as an analyst at Credit Suisse First Boston, followed by research and portfolio management roles at firms including Magellan, Wilson HTM and Colonial First State Global Asset Management.

She then spent almost three years as head of equities at JBWere and close to four years as chief investment officer at Mason Stevens, before deciding to take everything she had learned and build something of her own in October 2025.

"It's hard to start a business from scratch. There are so many things you need to do and learn and deliver on, from governance and business setups, and it keeps going. The list is long," she says.

Years of fixing other people's businesses, she says, gave her what she needed to build her own.

"You get to a point where you have enough lived experience that it was time to take that lived experience and do something with it," she adds.

Used to much longer sales cycles, Fernley has been pleasantly surprised at how quickly the firm has been able to sign seven wealth clients in a short period. She puts it down to the nature of the industry, where relationships are personal.

"Working with advice practices and family offices, it's a very personal relationship that you have with them, and they either love you or they don't love you," she says.

"I'm not for everyone. No one is for everyone."

Like all relationships, she says, it comes down to being a good fit for one another.

"First and foremost, it's personality. Are we right for them, and vice versa? That's no different to any relationship. Do we work or do we not work? Secondly, what is their problem to solve, and can we solve it?" she says.

Because no two problems are the same, arcpoint tailors its service to each client's needs.

It recently signed Hamilton Wealth, where it takes a collaborative "do it with me" approach, sitting on the investment committee and recommending changes the practice can choose to adopt.

For other clients, it does the work and reports back, while smaller, experienced practices get a low-touch subscription to the research and portfolio components to use themselves.

Sometimes, Fernley says, practices want to be able to point to their investment team and tell clients, "This is our chief investment officer."

"It's a really sensible way to do it in a fractionalised way, because you can get much more than what you can get yourself if you try to just do it internally," she notes.

"There's some really smart people out there, don't get me wrong, but it's very difficult for one person to cover the macro, the asset allocation, all the managers and the complexity of the breadth of investment opportunities in the market.

"That's a big job, and it's beyond any one individual."

This is also why Fernley is not doing it alone. In July, she brought in Brad Creighton as co-chief investment officer and named Tracey Wahlberg as partner and director of investment management.

"Both myself and my two business partners, Brad and Tracey, we're investors. We have all been responsible in an institutional context for billions of dollars being managed, and that makes us investors," she says.

Less than a year in, the team has learned its first lesson: when you're breaking through barriers to build a business, it's easy to move too fast.

"About three or four months ago, we were like, okay, we need to slow down to speed up...[The business] was just trying to do too much too quickly," she says.

Now, the focus is on putting guardrails, governance and structure around what they build, to make sure it's bulletproof. What drives the team, Fernley says, is a sense of fiduciary duty, a love of markets and the desire to deliver strong investment returns at the right level of risk.

"That's what gets us up in the morning. We're all market animals," she says.

For Fernley, though, the drive goes back further than markets.

"I come from very humble beginnings. My mother delivered mail. My dad was a cook, and so really, what's driven me for a lot of it is being able to provide for my family, being the best mother I can be, but also being able to provide for them," she says.

Her husband took on most of the childcare while their two children were young so she could keep working, a decision she says came down to practical realities of their earning capacity and the need to pay the bills. Being the only woman in the room, as she so often has been, comes with its own difficulties, she says.

"This is not an industry designed to enable women to succeed. It just isn't, and that probably is going to fall on people's ears badly, but it's the truth," Fernley says.

"As a woman in this industry, you just have to have a really thick skin and recognise that it's much harder for us to succeed. It just is."

Her response was to build her own network. Five years ago, she founded Fearless Femmes Collective (FFC), which now brings together about 100 senior women. When she launched arcpoint, that network gave back, with one member handling her press and another her legal work.

"We as women need to support one another, because we can make things happen if we work together," she says.

Still, she says, much of the industry's business happens away from the office, on the golf course or at the pub, and bias, conscious or not, remains.

She has tried to take up golf. "I'm really trying to like it, but I really don't," she laughs.

These days though the decisions get made at her table, not on someone else's course. fs