Letter from our CEO
What's in store for 2024? More insights, less effort and new CEM Communities...
Happy New Year! Our team has returned from the holidays re-charged. In this edition of Peer Intelligence, I share a few of the priority efforts we will deliver this year. Want to know more? Your CEM Relationship Manager would be pleased to take you through our Roadmaps.
Let’s start with our Investment Benchmarking Subscription (“IBS”). To simplify data provision, in this year’s survey, all respondents will have the option to provide data by individual manager mandates rather than by asset class. We beta-tested this functionality with strong success in 2023.
Stronger data provision will help drive one of our new initiatives: our Global Reporting Principles (“GRP”) scoring. We will test our new GRP rubric, aimed at delivering a data quality score to each survey respondent. The score will help each survey respondent identify areas where their relative data provision could be stronger. We see this bar rising over the next five years. Separately, we will also enhance the risk-adjusted performance metrics in our reporting.
By way of experimentation, we will introduce Limited Partners performance benchmarking by point on the J-curve. This will allow a more discrete and actionable assessment of private market class performance.
Our Defined Contribution (“DC”) Subscription is also focused on making life easier. Last year, we introduced the pre-population of surveys by recordkeepers. This year, you will also be able to populate your survey by inputting Morningstar tickers/CUSIPs.
The tickers will also give us the ability to provide greater insight, this time in the form of ESG benchmarking. We will beta-test the benchmarking of externally managed mandates using Sustainalytics ratings. This will be made available only to those Plans who express interest and are, ideally, willing to provide feedback on the ratings.
Separately, we will be capturing the first-order service attribute provided by recordkeepers. These will complement our cost benchmarking of recordkeepers. With record-keeping costs down, in bps, almost 55% over the past decade, we aspire to offer a window into the services Plans truly value.
Last year, we simplified the data provision for our Pension Administration Benchmarking Subscription (“PABS”) by cutting a third of the service scoring questions. This resulted in more timely reporting. In 2024, we will materially drop the effort for Plan Sponsors with fewer than 50,000 members to benchmark. We will also introduce our first digital dashboard, develop a new subscription for global DC administrators, and extend our Voice of the Customer module from the UK to North America.
Finally, across all of our subscriptions, we are launching a new cadre of CEM Communities. These are discrete groups of similar plans – by geography, approach and size – gathering to share and discuss best practices against a backdrop of CEM data and insights. If you’re keen to meet more of your peers, please reach out to your CEM Relationship Manager.
Before signing off, I’m delighted to point out items in this edition of Peer Intelligence that may interest you:
Thanks, as always, for reading.
Rashay
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