Ann Bennett Spence
Managing Director, Cambridge Associates LLC
Exeter, NH
Ann Bennett Spence is a Managing Director at Cambridge Associates LLC, a global investment advisory firm, where she heads the Enterprise Advisory (EA) practice. For institutions with endowments, the EA practice focuses on the role of the long-term investment portfolio within the context of the institution’s business model, covering the areas of strategic planning, enterprise risk, capital campaign assessment, and Board governance. Over the course of 35 years, Ann has worked with a great many colleges, research universities, museums, hospitals, foundations, independent schools, and others with an endowment or other form of permanent capital – both in the US and in other countries. Recently, as the “outsourced chief investment officer” (OCIO) model has come to the fore, governance studies have become particularly important. Ann’s prior experience included strategy consulting at Bain & Co., financial planning as an associate dean at Harvard College, and auditing at KPMG.
She has served on the Governance Committee, Audit Committee, and Finance Committee of the Board of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, a Harvard teaching hospital; and is a Board member of the Endeavor Foundation in New York City, which funds liberal arts colleges. She’s also helped to lead fundraising efforts for the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University.
She has an MBA from Stanford University, an MA in East Asian Studies from Harvard University, and a BA from Wellesley College. Because her father was a US Foreign Service Officer in China, Taiwan, Israel, Nigeria, and Vietnam, her upbringing was non-US. It was also bicultural, inasmuch as her mother was Chinese (from Beijing) and both parents focused their lives on Asia. Ann is married to Richard (Rick) Bowers, and she has three adultchildren: a son in portfolio management at JPMorgan Asset Management (NY); a daughter who’s the COO of startup firm Pomello, in San Francisco; and a daughter who’s a literary agent at Janklow & Nesbit in New York City.