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History • Leadership • Our Team • Partners • Testimonials

About Our History

Founded by former Merrill Lynch Managing Director Cynthia Hayes in 2008, Oculus Partners began with a simple objective: to help clients grow their businesses in healthy and sustainable ways.

Healthy growth is achieved by developing and implementing thoughtful strategies combined with delivering products that meaningfully solve customer needs. Sustainable growth results from the deployment of the right operating models populated with the right leadership and talent connected to a market messaging platform that articulates the business’ differentiators.

Throughout our history, we have sought to identify the strategic opportunities that transcend the critical issues of the day and provide analyses of options, design plans, assign resources, and implement solutions that are right for our clients. In bringing this to life, Oculus has drawn on creative experts with a broad and deep business knowledge to create real growth opportunities.

Cynthia established her firm’s reputation in 2008 as a strong collaborative partnership with her client’s best interests in mind through a series of successful engagements. Not long after opening its doors, Oculus Partners expanded its consultant-employee base with several industry professionals who’d worked with Cynthia in former professional lives. From 2008 until 2021, Cynthia grew the business by developing relationships with more than 35 different types of clients across financial services and employing a broad network of highly-experienced consultants.

In 2021, Jamie McInnes, acquired Oculus Partners from Cynthia, allowing her to pass on the company’s heritage to someone committed to continuing the organization’s development in a manner consistent with its founding. Jamie added breadth to the organization’s leadership with his insurance and organizational transformation background. Together with Cynthia, they have added new types of clients and engagements but have remained focused on helping our clients grow their businesses in healthy and sustainable ways.

Today, Oculus has over 40 institutional client relationships and continues to deliver engagements through bespoke teams formed with experienced practitioners that truly understand how to drive success.

Expertise

Over the years, Oculus Partners has been engaged by banks, insurers, broker-dealers, asset managers, platform providers, strategic outsourcing firms, recordkeepers, and financial technology firms large and small. 

Through these engagements, we have helped our clients identify opportunities for growth that have resulted in practical recommendations around strategic direction, product design, market messaging, and restructuring their value chains. 

Our consultants bring specific expertise from a career of practical experience with resumes that are populated with diverse leadership roles that have enabled these recommendations.

Oculus Partners has four primary areas of focus in which we have developed and deployed repeatable processes that ensure success in each and every engagement we take on.  These areas are: 

Oculus Partner

CONSULTANTS TO THE RETIREMENT & WEALTH MANAGEMENT INDUSTRIES

Contact Information

39 Todd Ridge Road

Titusville, NJ

08560

860-608-2608

About Jamie McInnes

Jamie McInnes

President

Jamie is a recognized leader with over thirty years of experience working in several firms across asset management, banking and insurance. His leadership roles have focused on a variety of business models and markets covering retirement, wealth management and protection. In 2018, he joined Oculus Partners as a Senior Consultant and, in January 2021, Jamie acquired the firm.

Prior to joining Oculus, Jamie spent 10 years at Prudential Financial. Initially, he worked within Prudential Retirement ultimately leading its full-service business which delivered defined contribution, defined benefit, deferred compensation, IRA and advisory services to 4,000 institutional clients and 2.5 million individual participants. His final three years at Prudential were spent in Prudential International Insurance developing and leading its market entry to Indonesia’s life insurance market. As the CEO he developed the local senior leadership team while expanding distribution inclusive of bank assurance, tele-marketing and a direct-to-consumer digital channel.

Jamie joined Prudential from Merrill Lynch where he led its Retirement Group’s institutional offerings covering DC, DB, NQDC and trust and custody. This followed his return from Japan where Jamie had initially been leading the platform development for CIGNA’S joint venture pension business as their CIO and subsequently as the firm’s Executive Director advising multi-national firms around pension risk issues and the benefits of transferring benefit programs to a DC framework.

Jamie began his career in management consulting focused on banking and insurance company back-office operations and entered the retirement business initially with Putnam Investments and then joining a VC backed on-line 401(k) company prior to relocating to Japan.

Jamie earned his undergraduate degree in Biochemical Sciences from Harvard College, has a MPhil degree in International Relations from the University of St Andrews, an MSc in Finance from the Sawyer School of Business at Suffolk University and is a Chartered Financial Analyst.

Passion/Area of Focus

Helping leaders align and enable their teams to accomplish goals they felt were unachievable.