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As a wealth management firm or financial fiduciary today, you face increasing pressure from regulatory and tax changes, greater fee transparency, and staying relevant to a new generation of investors. In today’s environment, you have to compete more actively for new business and balance your resources against increasing service expectations and regulatory demands.
On-average years of experience of our investment researchers1
Dedicated researchers worldwide1
Our unbiased, independent research allows you to navigate an uncertain market. We go beyond just performance numbers to provide forward-looking insights that span the diversity of the global economy and allow you to introduce new investment ideas to your clients.
Active management can generate repeatable excess return. However, it is rare. At Mercer, we believe using a manager research process enhances the probability of identifying alpha. The process is:
Through our in-depth, sophisticated global manager research, we can help you differentiate your business and have access to what we believe are the best ideas and a diverse range of portfolios. This also gives you more time to focus on client service and development. As one of the largest investment consultant worldwide3, we continue to invest in our intellectual capital. That means we devote a great deal of time to exploring new and smaller managers who are launching new strategies — the fund manager stars of tomorrow. And with our global reach, we’re able to meet them in-person anywhere in the world from New York to Sydney to Hong Kong and Singapore.
We believe that our research stands apart from the rest. While investment data available to financial intermediaries has been commoditized and does not distinguish one firm from another, Mercer’s deep research and due diligence process synthesizes not only the data but the insights from interviews to go beyond what’s publicly available. With more than 135 dedicated research professionals worldwide, we’re able to dive deep into the disciplines and competitive edge of investment managers. The end result? Forward-looking research that provides both qualitative insights and quantitative analysis, continually evolving to identify and assess any changes that could impact a portfolio.
From gathering data, prioritizing candidates to worldwide due diligence, ratings, and selection of candidates, we follow a highly rigorous and consistent research framework that enables objective and consistent comparison. The process includes idea generation, portfolio construction, and implementation. Here are factors we assess:
How strong is the manager’s ability to generate value-adding investment ideas?
How effectively are these investment ideas translated into weighting in the portfolio?
How much of the value-add is given back in the form of transaction costs and opportunity costs?
As part of the research process, MercerInsight plays a key role. This easy-to-use, cloud-based tool for monitoring and selecting investment managers provides access to insights and analytics on 5,900+ managers and 32,000+ strategies. Designed as the engine for our own internal staff, it’s made available to manager selection teams at pension plans, endowments, insurance companies and financial intermediaries around the world who value its rich content for idea generation and manager monitoring.
For institutional investors — MercerInsight provides global, comprehensive coverage of the products available and the ability to view a wide range of information from quantitative analysis on performance and holdings data to the ratings and recommendations from Mercer’s global manager research boutiques.
For investment managers — MercerInsight offers a performance evaluation tool that enables quantitative analysis with the ability to compare not only to the manager’s benchmark but also to more than 300 Mercer‑constructed peer groups and more than 800 market indices.
Our Global Investment Manager Database (GIMD™) is a proprietary, real-time database with information on more than 5,900 investment managers. GIMD makes your firm visible to Mercer’s global manager research team that conducts several thousand meetings with investment managers each year to identify investment strategies suitable for our clients.
We'd be happy to set up a free consultation or send you more information to get you started.
Across a diversified DC participant base, we generally see the following groups and encourage fiduciaries to keep this in mind when structuring the plan line-up — this way you can respond to the specific needs of each group.
These participants rarely review the portofolio, aren´t engaged in the investments decisions, and may prefer a default option that might include target date funds (TDFs).
These participants have some engagement to being fully engaged in investments decisions. In some cases, they even want a full range of investment options.
Africa
