About Matt
Matt’s career is in making money work for regular people by:
1) Advising public investors like pensions, sovereign wealth funds, central banks, and governments.
2) Governing investments in - and by - healthcare organizations.
3) Leading public policy efforts related to fiscal and financial management.
Matt Leatherman served as policy director to North Carolina Treasurer Janet Cowell and subsequently has helped to establish a financial research organization called Focusing Capital on the Long Term (FCLTGlobal). He is chair emeritus of the John Rex Endowment and a currently-serving director of the Foundation for Health Leadership and Innovation and the Raleigh Area Land Trust. Matt also advises the Catawba Center for the Environment, one of the largest-endowed university programs focused on the environment, and Reward Value, a Netherlands-based research center experimenting with ways that pay affects CEO behavior. Matt is active in public policy having campaigned to be North Carolina’s Treasurer in 2020.
Matt’s writing has been published in outlets ranging from the Washington Post and Politico to Institutional Investor and Top1000 Funds. Convenors like the International Forum of Sovereign Wealth Funds, Pacific Pensions & Investments, and NASDAQ commonly turn to Matt for his expertise and insight in their program.
Matt earned his Bachelor’s degree from the University of North Carolina and his Master’s degree from Columbia.
Matt joined the FHLI board in 2023. FHLI has a 40-year history of collaborating with healthcare providers and the NC Department of Health and Human Services, particularly it’s Office of Rural Health, to pilot innovations that can improve care across the state. The signature program in FHLI’s portfolio today is NCCare360, which supports providers in making referrals particularly when a specialist is not available in network or when wider social services are needed to support a patient.
Matt’s role on the board includes:
Advancing governance structures,
Aligning governance, strategy, and management as the organization looks to it’s next generation, and
Governing the organization’s investment corpus.
Matt joined the RALT board in 2024, the same time that the new organization hired it’s first full-time CEO, and now serves as Vice Chair. A colleague on the board, Dr. Rasheeda Monroe, powerfully described the issues that also inspired Matt to join in her commentary article, Home Is Where Health Begins. RALT uses a community land trust model common around the US to provide for affordable home ownership.
Matt is helping RALT to:
Institutionalize it’s business model, including revenue sources and strategic relationships,
Establish it’s financial model, including capital structure and investor deal negotiating, and
Originate it’s governance model.
Matt joined the John Rex Endowment board in 2016 and served as it’s Treasurer from 2018-2020, Chair from 2020-2023, and Secretary in 2024. JRE was born from the UNC Health System’s purchase of Rex Hospital in 2000, and it makes approximately $4 million in grants each year to support the social-emotional health of children living in Wake County, NC.
Read Matt’s reflections on this service here.
During his tenure, Matt:
Oversaw the organization’s first generational transition from start to finish, including the planned successions of CEO and CFO,
Restructured board committees specifically for a perpetual endowment, and
Governed a fully-diversified investment corpus.
Sovereign investors that collectively steward over $3 trillion turn to Matt for advice about how they can best serve the people who created them by aligning their capital allocation with their strategic purpose and time horizon.
Matt has done much of this work through a research institution that he has helped to establish called Focusing Capital on the Long Term, or FCLTGlobal. He supported NC Treasurer Janet Cowell as she participated in chartering FCLT, joined the staff months later as it’s first full-time researcher, and originated the entire suite of tools for institutional investors as well as many for corporations.
Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan provides one example in how it relied directly on Matt’s work in setting the terms that it prefers in investment management contracts.
FCLTGlobal published Institutional “Investment Mandates: Anchors for Long-term Performance” in December 2017. Many of our members have put this research to work since then, including Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, which manages $201.4 billion on behalf of 327,000 working and retired teachers in the province… When investors put FCLTGlobal’s research to work like this, it all adds up to more wealth for savers and more stable funding for companies.
Asset managers like Kempen in the Netherlands and MFS in the US also have relied on Matt’s work on long-term management contracts. Canada Pension Plan Investments offers another type of example from it’s infrastructure investments in Mexico and Chile, as does Schroders.
Matt’s ground-breaking research into how investors can integrate longer-term risk calculations into their asset allocation was short-listed by Savvy Investor for the best research in that category for the year. The Washington State Investment Board turned to this work on long-term risk at the height of the COVID pandemic and brought in Matt to help moderate a session with it’s trustees. Matt also hosted a series of public conversations on the topic throughout the pandemic, including executives ranging from the Hong Kong Monetary Authority to the US Steel pension fund and culminating in a conversation with Dr. Andrew Lo, author of The Adaptive Markets Hypothesis, about how his work is modernizing the profession and enabling moonshots like investments in curing cancer.
Investors ultimately are able to deliver make money work for people based on how they allocate that money to companies and the types of relationships that they have with companies. An entire subsection of Matt’s research product has focused on this connection between investors and corporations, especially in the boardroom.
“Expectations of long-term investment organizations expand well beyond common notions of their purpose to include their broader impact on markets, society, and the environment. Determining which expectations to accept as responsibilities is based on the long-term purpose of the organizations, its constituents, and the trade-offs that accepting such responsibilities would entail…
“Ripples of Responsibility assists long-term investment organizations in two ways. The first is by developing an understanding of the concept of responsibilities for investment organizations. The second is by providing a toolkit for navigating these circumstances, including tools for anticipating, fulfilling, and communicating responsibilities.”
Ripples of Responsibility: How Long-term Investors Navigate Uncertainty with Purpose
“Boards and executives of long-term funds, such as pension plans, sovereign wealth funds, and endowments, have a challenging problem. They need to manage those portfolios to meet their long-term purpose, which may be decades or more into the future. Yet no fund has the luxury of looking only to that long-term time horizon. Each must also meet expectations in the near term in order to continue in its role and with its investment strategy.
“To tackle this issue, FCLTGlobal, with input from its members, has developed practical tools… for boards and staff to move the issues of managing multiple-horizon portfolios onto the board meeting agenda.”
“The relationship between asset owners and managers presents a classic time-horizon mismatch. The asset owner has a specific set of investment objectives that correspond to its stakeholders, liabilities, responsibilities, return goals, and risk tolerance. The manager, in turn, has a different set of stakeholders. As a result, the goals and internal incentives facing its portfolio managers and business leaders are likely to differ substantially from those of the asset owners whose capital it manages…
“To address this challenge and facilitate long-term alignment, FCLTGlobal has developed research and tools in collaboration with leading global investors… FCLTGlobal’s Model for Long-Term Contract Provisions forms the core of this work. The model offers a starting point for contract negotiations between asset owners and managers, helping them define mandate terms that build trust, ensure alignment, and advance asset owners’ long-term goals.”
Institutional Investment Mandates: Anchors for Long-term Performance
“The ground is shifting in the global system of proxy voting. After decades of venting occasional frustration with proxy advisers, corporate and investment executives have refocused on the system and shifted toward a spirit of opportunity. Global companies and investment organizations can change the proxy system by helping to make sense of the status quo and developing alternatives that will lead to a stronger system.”
“Companies have unique strategies, cultures, and strengths and weaknesses. As companies grow, and especially if they shift from private to public markets, they encounter a set of norms that governance experts expect them to follow. Some of these norms are listing requirements or laws that companies must follow, but many are simply norms – somebody’s else’s playbook. Over time, the company’s competitive environment will undoubtedly change, and the board and management will need to adapt their strategy to thrive.
“This publication offers a way to craft that playbook, and to help company directors establish strategic, differentiated, long-term governance, drawing on perspectives and examples from public and private companies around the world.”
The Board Playbook: Winning Strategies for Long-term Value Creation
“Both investors and corporate directors strongly believe in the importance of using performance-linked pay. At the same time, the long-term effect on executives’ behavior and companies’ performance remains rooted in theory rather than evidence. Behavioral studies find that performance-linked pay motivates people effectively only for routine tasks—and a CEO’s job is anything but routine. This suggests performance-linked pay is not an easy solution to executive remuneration. And pay linked to the wrong metrics simply compounds the problem.
“The most effective remuneration structures are tailored to a company’s objectives, strategy, and management… Our tools empower companies to replace some commonly used elements today, reflect on their long-term needs, and effectively tailor long-term remuneration to corporate strategy.”
The Risk of Rewards: Tailoring Executive Pay for Long-term Success
Matt’s career in making money work for people began in the context of security strategy and spending. This included staffing a 2010 debt reduction commission chaired by former Senator Pete Domenici and former OMB Director Alice Rivlin and convened by the Bipartisan Policy Center as a supporting effort to President Obama’s deficit-cutting panel.
“The Task Force believes that the Pentagon is capable of setting the priorities needed to make these decisions while ensuring that the U.S. military remains a globally superior force well into the foreseeable future… as with all countries, the U.S. has to meet both its military and economic security needs by making choices and living within fiscal constraints.”
Strategic vision underpinned the budgetary recommendations that Matt and co-author Gordon Adams brought forward. Together with Adams, Matt published this strategy in Foreign Affairs and added additional context in the Washington Post. Matt continued to champion a strategically-grounded approach to security spending in the public debate in outlets like Bloomberg:
“The transatlantic burden-sharing conversation… is rooted in the imperative of aligning strategy and spending. Being honest about the math, both what European states are willing to commit and what the U.S. will prioritize in an era of austerity, is an essential component of strategy.”
- “Military’s Changing Strategy Should Drive Cost Cuts,” Bloomberg Government
Strategy is how to make money spent on security matter to people. By far the people with the greatest stake in this spending are service-members whose lives are on the line. Matt pressed this case as an expert contributor to a Harvard Business case about the combination of two military hospitals and in an article syndicated across the US, including in the Los Angeles Times:
“The obligation we have to these veterans is a moral one, but it will be measured in dollar terms, a massive cost arriving just as Congress and the White House attempt to control the budget. Fortunately doing the right thing also is the prudent thing. The Pentagon and VA can control long-term costs by cooperating to make sure that veterans get their needed care right now.”
- Pay for Veterans’ Care Now - Or Pay More Later, McClatchy-Tribune Syndicate
Matt contested the Democratic nomination for NC Treasurer in 2020, by far the closest race on that primary ballot, and won half of the state’s counties but ultimately fell just short. Matt’s inspiration for running was protecting the lifesaving care that the Treasurer’s office provided to his second-born child via the State Health Plan when she arrived three months prematurely. He campaigned on the basis of his experience as an executive in administration of Treasurer Janet Cowell and championed a platform focused on public education, equitable health care, and resilient communities.
Cardinal & Pine published Matt’s analysis of that year’s state-level electoral cycle in a three part series, and Matt shared an insider’s perspective on campaign finance in the Washington Post.
Matt remains involved in public policy through organizations like Americans for Responsible Growth, which works with financial officers from states and cities throughout the U.S. to ensure long-term sustainable economic growth, lower costs for consumers, and protect states' financial stability.
