FNB Coweta is offering a $150 bonus when you open a new checking account and complete one of the following requirements:
maintain at least $1,000 in qualifying direct deposits each month for three consecutive months OR
Open your new personal checking account with an initial deposit of $1,500 instead.
The Fine Print
$150 Welcome Bonus Terms & Conditions: Offer available to new FNB Coweta personal checking account customers only.
There are two ways to qualify.
Option 1: Open a new personal checking account and maintain qualifying direct deposits totaling at least $1,000 per month for three consecutive calendar months following account opening. Qualifying direct deposits include electronic deposits from an employer, pension, Social Security, or government benefit payment; internal transfers, mobile check deposits, ATM deposits, and cash deposits do not qualify.
Option 2: Open a new personal checking account with an initial deposit of at least $1,500 and keep the account open and in good standing through the close of the last statement of the 90-day period following account opening.
Under either option, the $150 bonus will be deposited into the customer’s FNB Coweta checking account after all qualifying requirements for the 90-day period have been met.
Bonus is considered taxable income and will be reported on the applicable IRS tax form.
Account must remain open and in good standing through bonus payout.
Existing FNB Coweta customers and those who have closed an FNB Coweta checking account within the previous 12 months are not eligible.
Limit one bonus per customer.
FNB Coweta reserves the right to modify or end this promotion at any time without notice.
Offer is subject to change.
All bank account bonuses are treated as income/interest and as such you have to pay taxes on them
Avoiding Fees
Monthly Fees
I don’t think the checking account has any monthly fee to worry about?
Early Account Termination Fee
I didn’t see any mention of an EATF in the fee schedule.
Our Verdict
Bonus itself looks easy to trigger, shame it can’t be opened online. Worth doing if you live in the area. You should be able to confirm if it’s a hard/soft pull before opening.
If you drive to the middle of nowhere in central Texas near Cameron—population 5,300—and down a gravel road, you’ll come upon a security gate with a sign stating, “Watch out for the cows.” The warning is no hyperbole, as cattle block the road, delaying the eventual sight of a massive oil-drilling rig.
A large, bearded man in red Halliburton coveralls and helmet says to beware of snakes and scorpions. “Not trying to scare you; that’s just part of the orientation.”
Welcome to the Deep Borehole Demonstration Center. The site is home to a partnership between the nuclear waste startup Deep Isolation Nuclear, the oilfield services leader Halliburton, known for its drilling and fracking expertise, and others.
The goal is to solve the nation’s nuclear waste disposal problems just in time to power the construction gold rush of AI data centers with a renaissance of next-generation nuclear energy. The partners aim to use modern, directional oil-drilling techniques to safely bury radioactive waste in perpetuity—about 2 miles underground—in specially designed, 5,000-pound canisters.
“To make sure we have a good path for new nuclear, we need to make sure we take care of the waste,” said Deep Isolation CEO Rod Baltzer. “We can go twice as deep as a typical [mined nuclear waste] repository, and then follow a formation that’s been out of touch with the surface for a million years.”
To date, more than 95,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel—and rising—sit in temporary storage across about 80 sites in over 30 states, with no permanent homes at the ready.
A decadeslong effort to develop a controversial, nationwide waste repository in the Nevada desert at Yucca Mountain has largely failed, and the federal government is still trying to figure out how to proceed. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in July just named five states—Idaho, Louisiana, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Utah—as finalists for “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses” to tackle nuclear fuel recycling and waste. Even if recycling technology proves to be the answer, there will still be waste left over. Deep Isolation believes it has the solution: drilling boreholes near nuclear plants—or anywhere else—for safe disposal. “You can put it where the waste is generated,” Baltzer said.
Combining oil and nuclear waste techniques was considered as long as 40 years ago, but the technology and economics weren’t feasible then. Only now is the topic being revisited, especially as the energy sector has perfected drilling much longer wells, including horizontally, to unlock more crude oil from geological rock formations. For Deep Isolation, the buried nuclear waste canisters can even be retrieved in case of emergency.
No one in the nuclear industry really understood the massive technological advancements made in oil drilling within the last 10 to 20 years, Baltzer told Fortune. “Everybody in oil and gas was like, ‘We do this every day,’” he said. “And everybody in nuclear went, ‘Holy cow, I did not know you could do this and retrieve it. That’s amazing.’ We realized there was this disconnect—they just weren’t talking to each other.”
Time is now of the essence as the AI race escalates, said Jesse Sloane, Deep Isolation executive vice president of engineering. After all, the Trump administration has committed to a fourfold increase in nuclear power by 2050.
“You can’t do that without answering the question of, ‘Well, what do you do with the waste?’” Sloane said.
Demo time
Early next year, Halliburton will drill the first test well—using an extra-large drill bit—to delve thousands of feet underground vertically and horizontally. And then demonstrate that a crane can reach back in and retrieve each canister one at a time.
“The nuclear community really wants to see us physically do something at scale and at depth here before they can really get behind it and understand how simple it really is,” said Andy Griffith, executive director of the demonstration center and former deputy assistant secretary of nuclear energy at the DOE.
“Even today, people are saying, ‘Well, I don’t know, it’s so risky. What if it gets stuck? What if the seal doesn’t work?’” Griffith continued. “And the oil and gas industry people are like, ‘This is not a big deal.’ But for people that are unfamiliar, they want to see it done. And that’s what we’re doing here. And they’ll be more open to it, I think.”
The shale oil boom was revolutionized in part by drilling vertically and then horizontally to dig deeper into the subsurface and crack open more shale rock to release the liquids inside. In this case, the same techniques will be used—except to carry the nuclear waste canister farther away from the surface and wellhead.
A common misconception, including within the oil business itself, is that vertical-then-horizontal drilling means making an “L” shape. In reality, the well may be drilled nearly 1 mile deep, and then curved by turning roughly 4 degrees every 100 feet. “It’s a very gradual bend,” Griffith said. “If you’re looking down a 4-degree-per-100-foot bend, you can’t tell it’s bent in any given section because it’s so gradual.”
Of course, while the oil industry now routinely drills 4-mile-long horizontal wells, replicating the feat for nuclear waste is no simple task—even if it doesn’t quite rise to the level of a “big deal.”
A well is typically drilled about 8 inches wide closer to the bottom, where the oil is sourced. The nuclear waste well will require drilling it about 22 inches wide instead, nearly triple the size. That means using a larger drill bit than normal, then coming back into the well with a “hole opener”—the actual, self-explanatory name for the tool—to expand the width.
This creates a more “interesting” and “fun” proposition, said Jason Foreman, Halliburton’s North America region manager.
“We drill wells all around the world in various combinations of challenges, and we do it every day,” Foreman told Fortune. “This project pulls them all together, which makes it a unique challenge.
“It’s a combination that includes the depth that we’re going to, the deviation, the horizontal well, the diameter of the hole, and the abrasive formation that we’re going through,” he continued. “Those things together create a unique challenge that we’re not sure has been done before.”
And it costs a lot of money to drill wells for these 15-foot nuclear waste canisters. But Deep Isolation is betting the economics work out far cheaper than building massive repositories such as Yucca Mountain.
Halliburton is newer to the AI and nuclear industries, but it’s still fundamentally about “well construction,” Foreman said. Nuclear is “another source of energy,” and Halliburton is in the energy business, he said. “From our perspective, it’s a well. In this market, they’re entering a realm that Halliburton lives and breathes in.”
Approaching urgency
Deep Isolation was founded a decade ago by Liz Muller and her physicist father, Richard, and they recruited Baltzer, a longtime nuclear waste executive, to join them in 2018.
Liz Muller handed their CEO reins to Baltzer in 2024—just as momentum was beginning to build—to start a sister company, Deep Fission, which is developing small modular nuclear reactors to operate underground as well.
Deep Isolation went public in July on the over-the-counter venture market, OTCQB, with a market cap of nearly $300 million. But the company still needs prove out its demonstration project, attract more capital, and work through regulatory issues before it can truly take off, Baltzer acknowledged.
“After spending 25 years in the back end of the nuclear fuel cycle with waste, this is the most interest I’ve ever seen,” Baltzer said.
Last month, the DOE selected Deep Isolation for three grants alongside the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and the University of South Carolina as part of the Trump administration’s “Genesis Mission” to utilize AI for “energy dominance.” In these cases, they’re studying AI modeling for ideal nuclear waste disposal site screening and design.
With so many advancements underway, the biggest hurdle may be the federal Nuclear Waste Policy Act, which essentially bars any permanent nuclear waste disposal licensing outside of Yucca Mountain, a project that is now, again, essentially defunct. The Trump administration and Congress are actively weighing solutions.
The path forward isn’t necessarily simple. Although sentiment is swinging back in favor of nuclear power, many communities remain skeptical of nuclear power plants in their areas, let alone nuclear waste disposal. That’s why storing everything in rural Nevada was long considered the easiest path. And the safety of Deep Isolation’s approach must still be definitively proven, even if it works well on paper.
In the meantime, Baltzer knows the reality of the situation means Deep Isolation may have to develop its first commercial project internationally. The company is actively engaged with Bulgaria and other possible partners. And the initial project—wherever it ends up—is unlikely to come online until the early 2030s. That timing could still mesh nicely with the potential nuclear renaissance, so long as the U.S. regulatory system is reformed before then.
“We want to bring our communities out, our regulators out, and let them kick the tires, and see how it works,” Baltzer said.
So, grab a helmet and head down to central Texas. Just beware of the snakes.
🎓 Principles of Management | Class 12 Business Studies | Full Chapter Explained with Animation
Welcome to BST Bhaiya! In this video, we explain the Principles of Management chapter from Class 12 Business Studies in a simple, crisp, and animated way—perfect for quick revision before your exams!
Mind Map –
📌 What you’ll learn in this video:
✔️ Meaning and Importance of Management Principles
✔️ Henri Fayol’s 14 Principles of Management
✔️ Scientific Management by F.W. Taylor
✔️ Difference Between Fayol and Taylor
✔️ Real-life Applications of Principles
✔️ NCERT-based questions and examples
📚 This video is strictly based on the CBSE syllabus and follows the NCERT book. Ideal for last-minute revision and concept clarity!
🔔 Don’t forget to LIKE, SHARE & SUBSCRIBE to BST Bhaiya for more animated videos on Business Studies Class 12.
📢 Follow us on:
📸 Instagram: www.instagram.com/bstbhaiya
The PSLF Buyback backlog stood at roughly 88,000 pending requests as of April 30, 2026, though the Department of Education estimates 18,000 to 19,000 of those are duplicate submissions.
April 2026 was the first month decisions outpaced new requests since court-ordered reporting began: 6,870 requests were processed against 4,790 received, with a 96% approval rate.
Based on reader reports to The College Investor, average processing time now runs 20 to 24 months — borrowers who submitted requests in December 2024 are still waiting as of August 2026.
The Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) Buyback program lets borrowers pay for past months spent in deferment or forbearance so those months count toward the 120 payments needed for forgiveness. The program popular due to the SAVE forbearance and remains badly backed up.
As of the most recent court-filed data, about 88,000 buyback requests were pending with the Department of Education. That’s up from 49,318 when court-ordered reporting began in mid-2025, and it peaked at 89,720 in March 2026. The department now says a meaningful share of the queue (an estimated 18,000 to 19,000 requests) are duplicates from borrowers who submitted more than once while waiting, which would put the true number of borrowers in line closer to 69,000 to 70,000.
There is one piece of real progress: April 2026 was the first month on record where the department decided more buyback requests than it received. Whether that pace holds is the question that will determine how long borrowers keep waiting.
What The Numbers Look Like
For most of the program’s existence, borrowers had no visibility into the buyback queue. That changed because of a lawsuit.
The American Federation of Teachers sued the Department of Education over stalled income-driven repayment (IDR) and PSLF processing. Under the resulting agreement in AFT v. U.S. Department of Education, the department must file status reports with the federal court showing exactly how many IDR and buyback applications it received, processed, approved, and denied each month. The agreement also protects delayed borrowers from an unexpected tax bill — more on that below.
The most recent report, filed May 19, 2026, covers April and shows:
4,790 new buyback requests received
6,870 requests processed — 6,600 approved, 200 denied, and 70 closed without a decision
11,500 loan discharges completed
~88,000 requests still pending
The approval rate has climbed sharply. In February 2026, about 81% of decided requests were approved. By April, that figure hit 96%,a sign the department is clearing eligible requests rather than working through denials.
One caveat: some of those denials and closures are hitting borrowers who reached 120 qualifying payments on their own while waiting, making their buyback requests moot by the time they were reviewed.
Judge Reggie B. Walton held a status conference in the case on August 5, 2026, and the next one is set for September 2, 2026. Data covering May, June, and July had not been publicly filed as of this update.
It’s also likely the queue of pending requests has dropped to the 60,000 range as the duplicates were removed en-masse in June and July 2026.
How Does PSLF Buyback Work?
PLSF Buyback allows borrowers seeking Public Service Loan Forgiveness to make payments for time in forbearance as a lump sum.
Borrowers interested in PSLF Buyback must submit a request through PSLF Reconsideration and specify that they are seeking to buy back months. If approved, they must make a lump-sum payment equivalent to what they would have owed under an Income-Driven Repayment (IDR) plan for the months they are buying back.
Key details on eligibility:
Borrowers must have 120 approved months of qualifying employment before applying.
Only deferment or forbearance periods tied to eligible employment can be bought back.
The buyback amount is calculated based on what the borrower’s IDR payment would have been at the time.
Payments must be completed within 90 days of receiving the buyback agreement.
Once the payment is made, the borrower’s loan is processed for PSLF forgiveness.
How Long Does PSLF Buyback Take?
The process still follows five stages, but the wait at stage two is where borrowers get stuck:
Request submitted through StudentAid.gov
Review — a manual eligibility check by Federal Student Aid staff. This is the bottleneck. Based on reader reports to The College Investor, average processing time is now 20 to 24 months, and borrowers who submitted in December 2024 are still waiting as of August 2026.
Buyback agreement sent with the amount owed
Payment window — 90 days to pay
Final processing — forgiveness and discharge, which can take several additional weeks to show on your account
When this article was first published in early 2025, the department was quoting 60 to 90 days for processing. That guidance is gone.
The department no longer publishes an official timeline, and the math explains why: even at April’s record pace of 6,870 decisions per month, working through 88,000 pending requests would take about 13 months — or roughly 10 months if the duplicate requests are stripped out first. And that math only covers the current queue, not the borrowers already deep in it. The department says it plans to identify and remove duplicates up front rather than catching them later in the process, which should help.
If you’re close to 120 payments, it may pay to compare buyback against simply resuming payments — many borrowers in the queue will hit 120 through regular monthly payments before their request is ever reviewed.
What This Means For Your Household
If you’re waiting on buyback, your loans stay in their current status until the request is decided — and for many borrowers, that means payments continue. Here’s the practical fallout:
Keep making payments if you’re in repayment. Months you pay while waiting still count toward PSLF if you’re in a qualifying plan and job. If forgiveness comes through later, payments made beyond your 120th qualifying month should be refunded.
Don’t count on forgiveness for near-term financial planning. If you’re budgeting around loan forgiveness — for a home purchase, a career change, or retirement timing — build in about two years of cushion. Borrowers who submitted in December 2024 are still waiting.
Don’t submit a second request. Duplicate submissions don’t speed anything up. The department has flagged roughly one in five pending requests as duplicates, and they’ve clogged the queue for everyone.
Watch your email and StudentAid.gov account. The 90-day payment clock starts when your agreement arrives. Missing that window means starting over. Our PSLF checklist covers what to track while you wait.
Is Buyback Protected In The Future?
Despite all the proposed changes to student loans, PSLF buyback does appear safe for now. It has bipartisan support because borrowers are making payments towards their loans, and that’s viewed as a good thing.
However, it’s not guaranteed to exist forever. While PSLF was created by Congress (and thus would require Congressional action to eliminate), PSLF Buyback was created through rulemaking. This means that the current administration could create new rules to change the program or eliminate it.
Since borrowers are making lump sum payments, this currently doesn’t appear to be under threat. But with the layoffs at the Department of Education, the manual process of PSLF buyback may be facing serious delays.
If you are eligible for PSLF buyback, you should submit your reconsideration request as soon as possible to make sure you’re in the queue.
As international home demand shifts away from traditional coastal markets, Texas has emerged as a relative beneficiary, particularly as affordability pressures in California continue to redirect where global buyers look first.
Texas international residential buyers — April 2025 to March 2026
Homes purchased
7,780
Up 4% from 7,500
Total spending
$4B
Down from $4.8B
Median price
$375K
Down 11% YoY
Share of TX sales
2.3%
Same as prior year
Country of origin — share of Texas purchases
Texas vs top US states — share of all US international purchases
Buyer profile
62%
US residents on visa or recent immigrants
57%
Purchased a primary residence
83%
Bought a detached single-family home
58%
Chose a suburban location
Top reasons international clients did not purchase
Source: 2026 Texas International Residential Transactions Report, Texas Realtors. Survey research by the National Association of Realtors Research Group.
Who is buying and what they’re buying
Most international buyers in Texas, or 62%, were residents living on visas or as recent immigrants rather than non-resident foreign nationals.
Primary residences accounted for 57% of purchases, and detached single-family homes made up 83% of transactions.
Suburban locations drew 58% of buyers, and 38% paid all cash.
For clients who did not ultimately purchase, cost, lack of suitable inventory, and immigration laws each deterred 27% of prospective buyers, a notable shift from the prior year, when financing access ranked among the top barriers at 19%.
Two drivers of Mercedes AMG cars have filed a class action lawsuit against the luxury car company, claiming that the AMG logo on their driver’s seat gets so hot that it literally brands them and causes burns.
Gabriel Lahijani and Karendeep “Karina” Bath allege the front seats of certain Mercedes AMG vehicles have a design defect where the raised metallic AMG logo is “reasonably expected to contact an occupant’s upper back, neck, or shoulder,” according to the court document filed earlier this week in the U.S. District Court of California’s Western division.
The plaintiffs want Mercedes to compensate them for any medical expenses, as well as any pain, suffering and emotional distress they can prove at trial. They also want Mercedes to pay for other owners to have the logo removed from their cars.
Mercedes-Benz couldn’t be reached immediately for comment.
Lahigani, a Los Angeles resident, had leased a new 2026 Mercedes-AMG E-Class vehicle from an authorized Mercedes-Benz dealership in Los Angeles, according to the suit. He reported receiving second-degree burns on his back on May 31, after entering his vehicle wearing a tank top. A board-certified dermatologist subsequently documented first- and second-degree burns, describing the injury as “AMG inscribed.”
Roughly six weeks later, Bath, a Chatsworth, California resident, received similar burns allegedly from the logo design while wearing a sleeveless top. After parking her Mercedes-AMG vehicle in Los Angeles, Bath returned to the vehicle and entered the driver’s seat, the suit said. Her shoulder immediately touched the logo, causing a burning sensation. In the following days, a mark in the shape of the AMG logo “darkened and became visible on her skin, consistent with a thermal contact burn,” the lawsuit said.
In December, Mercedes-Benz USA and parent company Daimer AG agreed to pay $149.6 million to settle allegations that the automaker secretly installed devices in hundreds of thousands of vehicles to pass emission tests, according to an announcement by a coalition of attorneys general.
According to the coalition, between 2008 and 2016 the German automaker equipped more than 211,000 diesel passenger cars and vans with software devices that optimized emission controls during tests but reduced the controls during normal operations.
The European Union is advancing a formal review of its Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation (MiCA), with particular attention directed toward rules governing stablecoins issued outside the bloc. Officials view the exercise as necessary to close gaps that have become more visible since the framework entered full application and amid international developments in digital assets.
MiCA created the EU’s first comprehensive, harmonized set of rules for crypto-assets, their issuers and service providers.
Provisions covering asset-referenced tokens and e-money tokens (commonly known as stablecoins) began applying in mid-2024, with the remaining requirements taking effect later that year.
The regulation requires EU-based authorisation for issuers, imposes strict reserve, redemption and disclosure obligations, and aims to protect consumers while supporting innovation within a single market.
However, the current text does not explicitly address multi-issuer arrangements in which the same fungible stablecoin is issued both by an EU-authorised entity and by entities based in third countries.
Nor does it contain an equivalence mechanism that would allow recognition of comparable regulatory regimes elsewhere.
As a result, non-EU issuers that wish to reach European users generally need to establish a local presence and meet MiCA standards in full.
Policymakers have grown concerned that this approach may limit access to global liquidity, create supervisory challenges when reserves are held across jurisdictions, and leave room for regulatory arbitrage.
These issues have gained urgency following the adoption of dedicated stablecoin legislation in other major markets, notably the United States.
Dollar-denominated tokens continue to dominate global volumes, and European institutions, including the European Central Bank, have highlighted potential financial-stability risks arising from cross-border multi-issuance structures.
At the same time, market activity in tokenised deposits and other distributed-ledger-based payment instruments has expanded, areas that fall partly or wholly outside MiCA’s original perimeter.
In response, the European Commission opened public and targeted consultations in May 2026.
Stakeholders were invited to comment on whether the existing rules remain fit for purpose, whether an equivalence regime for third-country stablecoin frameworks should be introduced, how multi-issuer models should be treated, and whether the regulation’s scope should be widened to cover additional activities such as certain forms of decentralised finance, staking, lending and tokenised payments.
The deadline for responses was later extended to the end of September 2026.
Under the terms of MiCA itself, the Commission is required to deliver a review report by mid-2027.
That report may be accompanied by legislative proposals.
Diplomats familiar with the discussions describe a reopening of the file as effectively inevitable, driven both by internal institutional positions and by the need to keep pace with technological and regulatory changes abroad.
Any eventual amendments would still need to navigate the ordinary legislative procedure, meaning new rules would be unlikely to take effect before 2028.
The review therefore represents an opportunity to refine Europe’s approach: preserving strong consumer and financial-stability safeguards while improving interoperability with global markets and ensuring the framework remains competitive. Crypto and blockchain industry participants, supervisors and other interested parties have a clear window in which to shape the next iteration of the rules.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy sits down with Dan Loeb, the legendary investor and founder of Third Point. Dan shares his incredible evolution from a deep-value, event-driven credit investor to a dynamic capital allocator spanning equities, venture capital, and private credit. They dive into the current macro environment, focusing heavily on the transformative power of AI, semiconductors, and energy. Dan also unpacks his most memorable activist campaigns, including Sotheby’s and Sony, and explains what makes a truly great corporate governance structure. Additionally, he reveals the painful lessons learned from the FTX collapse, the genius of the Danaher business system, and how his firm uses reinsurance to drive growth. This is a masterclass in market adaptation, continuous improvement, and the enduring value of human connection in finance.
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro
2:48 Macro Views and Tech Trends
5:13 The Roots of Third Point
10:30 Evolving to Quality and Thematic Investing
19:07 Market Psychology and Inefficiencies
24:10 Good and Bad Corporate Governance
29:19 Activism
31:23 Sotheby’s
41:37 AI
44:28 Sony
52:50 Danaher’s Operating System
56:31 Building an Insurance Business
59:25 FTX
1:05:17 What Makes a Great Analyst Today
1:07:24 The Next Decade
1:10:00 Kindest Thing
Presented by Ramp:
Sponsored by Vanta, WorkOS, Rogo, and Ridgeline:
******
Patrick O’Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc
Strategic asset allocation has served as the dominant organizing framework for institutional investment over three decades. It has provided clear governance, disciplined benchmarking, and a common language grounded in modern portfolio theory. For many asset owners, SAA remains fit for purpose.
But SAA has structural limitations that are becoming harder to ignore. Benchmarks can drift from an institution’s actual objectives — such as meeting liabilities, preserving purchasing power, and supporting intergenerational equity — to becoming ends in themselves. The separation of benchmark design from portfolio construction fragments decision making, with asset-class teams optimizing locally rather than collectively. And the largely static capital market assumptions on which SAA depends are increasingly unreliable in an environment shaped by AI disruption, expanding private markets, sustainability risks, and shifting geopolitics. The question confronting many asset owners today is not whether these limitations exist but whether they have become material enough to warrant a different approach.
The total portfolio approach offers an integrated, goal-driven, and dynamic framework that evaluates every investment based on its contribution to the total fund’s objectives rather than managing capital through rigid asset-class silos. Evidence from leading adopters, including Australia’s Future Fund and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund (NZ Super), suggests that TPA strengthens governance alignment, increases portfolio resilience, and is associated with strong performance.
This report is written primarily for asset owner boards, CIOs, and senior investment leaders who are questioning whether their current SAA-based framework remains adequate and who seek to learn how TPA can be adopted effectively and safely. Portfolio managers, outsourced chief investment officers (OCIOs), and service providers supporting these institutions may also take interest in the report.
To ground this report in current practice, its contents are informed by interviews with 14 senior executives working with organizations that are adopting TPA. Our findings suggest the following:
TPA is a spectrum, not a binary switch: Organizations can adopt TPA in stages, from enhancing their existing SAA with total-fund thinking (expressed as “Level 1”) to full one-fund integration (expressed as “Level 5”). Partial transitions may still offer significant benefits, and full transition may not be cost-effective in many cases.
The barriers to adoption tend to be organizational rather than technical: The most commonly cited challenges are cultural change, team coordination, and governance — not investment methodology. For this reason, much of this report focuses on people and change management within TPA adoption.
After reading this report, asset owners should be more equipped to
assess whether their current SAA framework adequately serves their fund’s real objectives;
evaluate organizational readiness for TPA adoption, including governance, culture, skills, and data capabilities;
identify which level of TPA integration is appropriate for their circumstances; and
begin with practical first steps, such as belief setting, governance review, or reference portfolio design.
The transition to TPA requires important changes to governance structures, technology capabilities, and investment processes. It is not a quick fix. But for organizations willing to invest in the foundations, TPA represents a gateway that can catalyze stronger resilience, more adaptive decision making, and better portfolio alignment to long-term objectives.
![[OK, Coweta In Branch Only] FNB Coweta $150 Checking Bonus, Direct Deposit Not Required](https://globalinvestmentstrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/08/fnb-coweta-150-checking-bonus-1024x677-768x508.png "[OK, Coweta In Branch Only] FNB Coweta $150 Checking Bonus, Direct Deposit Not Required")
