Dennis R Hammond

Dennis R. Hammond founded Hammond Associates (Hammond Associates Institutional Fund Consultants, Inc., "HAIFC") in St. Louis in 1985 and led it as CEO for roughly 25–30 years. Under his leadership it grew into one of the largest U.S. investment-consulting firms serving endowments, foundations, higher-education institutions, and the private-wealth and healthcare markets, ultimately advising more than 200 clients with around 120 investment professionals. In his consultant role he helped institutions conceptualize their investment objectives and integrate them with asset allocation and manager selection across their portfolios.

In November 2010, Mercer (a Marsh & McLennan company) agreed to acquire Hammond Associates, and the deal closed effective January 3, 2011 — a transaction widely covered as significantly strengthening Mercer's U.S. endowment-and-foundation consulting position. Terms were not disclosed.

Hammond currently serves as Head of Institutional Investments at Veriti Management LLC, a Boston-based registered investment adviser founded in 2018 that provides customized, tax-efficient direct-indexing portfolios. There he works with institutional clients to build responsible-investing solutions tailored to specific values and preferences — faith-based, ESG, and UN Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) screens — using positive and negative screening.

On education, Hammond holds an LL.M. in Taxation from Washington University School of Law (St. Louis), a J.D. from Villanova University School of Law, and a B.A. in English from the University of Kansas. Beyond investing, he founded the SandPointe Foundation, which serves severely disadvantaged people in Haiti, and sits on the board of the New Life Children's Home in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He resides in West Palm Beach, Florida.

• Values-aligned, tax-efficient public-market investing, not venture. At Veriti, Hammond's work centers on direct indexing that lets institutions personalize portfolios to their values while capturing tax benefits — "faith-based, corporate, environmental, social, or governance (ESG), and UN SDG" objectives implemented through custom positive/negative screens.
• Institutional client base: endowments, foundations, healthcare systems, and donor-advised funds — the same constituencies he served for nearly four decades at Hammond Associates.
• Consulting-driven approach: as an endowment consultant, his stated method was helping clients "conceptualize their investment needs and integrate them with their asset allocation and manager population."
• Scale over startups: the "check sizes" relevant to him are institutional mandates (e.g., a reported $120M award) and firm-level AUM growth, not seed-stage venture checks.