Since the emergence of “Modern Portfolio Theory” and the “Capital Asset Pricing Model” in the late 1960s, institutional investors have taken a quantitatively driven approach to portfolio construction, looking to create portfolio diversification and obtain better risk-adjusted returns by balancing their asset-class exposures. This journey has seen several important advancements in thinking about how to optimally achieve desired results.
Funds that want to take the total portfolio approach first need to get the total portfolio view. To do that they not only need data – and lots of it – but a rock-solid understanding of exactly how they’re going to use it.
Phillips reimagines investment data
Ben Phillips has left Casey Quirk, the specialist funds management consulting arm of Deloitte, after 13 years with the business. He has taken a role blending new technologies with investment data on a grand scale.
The role, as head of asset management for ‘Global Advisory Services’ with fintech giant Broadridge Financial Solutions, aims to build on that company’s data analytics and research capabilities for global managers. The NYSE-listed Broadridge is a 60-year-old company with more than 13,000 employees and annual turnover of about US$5 billion.
Broadridge has specialised in middle and back-office data and communications infrastructure covering corporate governance and trading. A lot of the data enable anonymised information on investor processing with flows, separate accounts and advice networks.
“It’s data about data,” Phillips said last week (November 3) after starting with the Long Island, New York firm. “It’s one of the most interesting data sets I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with. It’s huge. So, we are looking to expand how that gets used by the leaders of asset management firms.”
He said he hoped to travel to Singapore, the Broadridge APAC region headquarters, and Australia as soon as practicable in the role. “This is a terrific opportunity; I’m honestly very excited by it,” he said.
Prior to Casey Quirk, where he was the partner who led the merger with Deloitte and became a principle and lead investment management strategist with that firm, Phillips was with a funds management investment bank, Jefferies Putnam Lovell and before that spent seven years at Cerulli Associates, which specialises in research for the global wholesale and retail investment sectors.
It was at Cerulli that Phillips became well known in Australia, with frequent visits advising in particular on the latest trends in the platform market around the world.
He started his career as an investment journalist with a Boston-based publication, Investment Management Weekly (IMW), in 1988, which provided unique market intelligence on mandate changes and other business opportunities for fund managers.
IMW’s founding publisher, Richard Chimberg, sold the title to Thomson Reuters magazine in 1996 and the two went their separate ways. Chimberg later co-founded and is a partner in a communications agency, CL-Media Relations, in Boston.
In a sense, for Phillips, the management consulting and research roles have represented a continuation of his journalistic start looking to make a living through the provision of superior information about trends and developments in asset management globally.
Dan Cwenar, the president of Broadridge Data and Analytics, said: “As the asset management industry navigates a dynamic, disruptive environment, the importance of data-driven decisions and critical market insights are key ingredients for strategic and business planning.”
