THE SURVEY
This year’s research asked representatives from 43 asset management firms to anonymously rate a pool of 21 investment consultants (up from 15 in 2014). The respondents comprised members of asset management firms, typically heads of consultant relations or institutional business. The list of consultants was by no means exhaustive, but we have aimed to include the best-known companies in the industry.
portfolio institutional asked respondents to rate each one of the consultants across four categories:
– Willingness to take on board new ideas or products, taking into consideration if and how often they come up with new ideas.
– Quality of research, taking into account depth of knowledge of asset classes, operational due diligence, time it takes to rate funds, thoroughness when questioning managers.
– Relationship management, taking into account frequency of ongoing communication, regularity/thoroughness of feedback on funds, speed of responding to queries, putting managers forward for beauty parades.
– Innovation and development in defined contribution pensions, taking into account ability to prepare for auto-enrolment, innovation in default fund design, ability to carry out due diligence around DC fund choices for platforms.
Each of the consulting firms were ranked using a points system of one to four, with one to denote ‘very poor’, two for ‘poor’, three for ‘good’ and four points for ‘very good’. The scores were then tallied up for each consultant in each of the four categories and combined to give an overall score.
However, to avoid respondents rating consultants if they had never worked with or did not know them, as well as where no answer was given, a ‘score after weighing against actual responses’ was calculated by dividing the sum of points per category by the number of actual responses. The survey therefore only considered votes where an asset manager had a working relationship with the consultant or felt familiar enough with them to be able to judge their abilities.
