Investment Metrics
Institutional Investment Expertise Backed by Cutting Edge Technology

Investment Metrics powers the global institutional investment community by providing institutional data aggregation, investment performance analytics, and portfolio reporting solutions fueled by the industry’s leading database. The company’s platform enables investment professionals to analyze and report on over $10 trillion of assets under advisement with accuracy and efficiency. By leveraging its unprecedented insights into global asset allocation trends, performance benchmarks, asset flows, plan sponsor and style universe performance, the company empowers hundreds of investment consultants, asset owners, asset managers, wealth managers and financial institutions to make more informed investment decisions.

As part of its Market Insights platform for data analytics and asset manager research, Investment Metrics recently announced the release of its Fee Analyzer product. Built with the guidance of industry leaders, Fee Analyzer empowers asset managers, asset owners, and investment consultants to utilize actual post-negotiated asset manager fee data to gain competitive insights across the institutional investment landscape. In fact, it is the first solution that drives competitive insights by bringing together a broad and reliable data source of actual fees in an online, interactive environment. In an interview with CIO Applications magazine,Brent Burns, CEO of Investment Metrics (IM), narrates how Fee Analyzer is revolutionizing the global institutional investment community.

Can you tell us how Fee Analyzer works, and how clients benefit from it?

Fee Analyzer provides a robust set of actual post-negotiated fee data sourced and aggregated from thousands of live institutional portfolios housed on the IM performance reporting platform used by leading institutional asset allocators. In the past, fee data has been cobbled together from incomplete, infrequently updated sources that lack external validation. Fee Analyzer addresses these shortcomings, resulting in the most comprehensive and trustworthy source of actual, post-negotiated fees across major asset classes, investment vehicles and plan types. With Fee Analyzer, users can create custom fee universes across various asset class hierarchies, compare multiple asset classes by investment vehicle, and view fee distribution across many dimensions including mandate size, plan type, and plan size.

Additionally, the interactive solution allows users to compare and correlate fees with actual performance and various modern portfolio theory statistics.

As a solution provider, what are your strategies to cater to the demands of the market? How do you meet such requirements?

Having spent 20 years in the technology landscape, we know that there is nothing more powerful than involving our clients in solution design and development. Given the current market pressures around fees, we developed an advisory board consisting of key institutional asset managers ranging from globally focused multi-asset managers to smaller, single asset class managers. We shared our product vision with the Advisory Board members and Fee Analyzer is an outcome of that group’s direction.

Can you tell us more about the changing marketplace and provide a brief overviewof how Fee Analyzer answers these needs?

There’s a data revolution in asset management today. With the ongoing industry push for greater transparency and comparability, fee information has become a critical need. In fact, fees are becoming a top priority for institutional investors, and now with Fee Analyzer, a comprehensive, actual post-negotiated fee database is finally available to meet their needs.

Asset managers need insight on how their fees stack up to their peers and the market. Institutional investment consultants need insight into fees when supporting their clients in manager selection and fee negotiations. The challenge asset managers and consultants face today is they are forced to cobble together a view of actual fees in the institutional market from a variety of sources, most of which are incomplete, self-reported, and not viewed as reliable or not timely. Asset managers and asset allocators who invest in this technology will gain access to the most comprehensive, timely and reliable actual fee data available.

What are some of the key points that differentiate the organization as a solution provider from a technology perspective?
We’ve been developing leading technology solutions for the institutional investment market for 20 years. It’s our primary focus. We have the most comprehensive and complete data set representing the institutional investment market. This allows us to bring unique, differentiated and highest value products to market. As the next generation source of fee data, Fee Analyzer is changing the game in the institutional investment market. For the first time the market has a full and completely accurate view of actual, post-negotiated fees. Such solutions give our customers a real competitive edge, which subsequently, becomes our real differentiator.
What is the roadmap of your company ahead?

As a company, IM is just beginning to leverage our unique position in the market. Our actual fee data is driven off live portfolio fee schedules used in calculating performance for over 20,000 institutional plans and over 500,000 portfolios. The 2019 launch of Fee Analyzer is just the first of many data solutions that we’ll offer. During 2020 we’ll be delivering additional new data products, as well as enhancing our portfolio analytics and reporting tools. The new capabilities will help us reach additional market segments and further extend our dominate position in the institutional performance analytics and reporting market.