The Exchanges

Q How do you think about the challenge of serving so many different clients, client types, and individuals and organizations?

A One of the benefits that we have by having almost 5000 individuals around the world is there are individuals that specialize, right? You've got folks that specialize in serving endowments and foundations. Globally, we have a large defined benefit corporate pension client segment base that we serve both on the actuarial, but also investment side, the wealth management segment. What we've been seeing over time as we continue to diversify away sort of the core client base of the DB corporate segment is increasing specialization. So now we've got global heads of, say, the financial intermediaries, global heads of NFP, global heads of insurance, and then you cascade that throughout the organization. We look to do the same thing across the investments businesses. We believe that roughly 80% of the questions that say an insurer is concerned about within their alternatives portfolios, we can probably answer that quite systematically. There's always 20% you have to really answer on a bespoke basis, but really trying to think about serving those clients as systematically, yet reserve the amount of flexibility and customization that they need.

AI assessment note: “serving those clients as systematically, yet reserve the amount of flexibility and customization”

Q This is going to be a really fun dive into Mercer. Raylan, why don't we start with you? A little bit of your path to the seat, and then we'll go into the overview of the business.

A I moved from New York City to Sacramento in late, and that's really when I got into the world of private markets. And over the years, I've pretty much led and been active in all aspects of our industry from risk management to advice to implementation to Research, co-investments, so on and so forth, and before joining Mercer, which joined by way of acquisition in November of 2018, I was a global out of private debt, so I'd really been an example of somebody who really works their way up from the bottom to the top. December of 2019, the opportunity became available for me to take the helm here leading our global alternatives business, and I've been doing that ever since.

AI assessment note: “December of 2019, the opportunity became available for me to take the helm”

Q With that scale and breadth, how do you think about what the distinctive characteristics are of Mercer?

A One of the things that I think about a lot is if you think about what we have as an institution and that we can show up to any client conversation And be with them where they are on their specific journey. You know, we at Mercer are agnostic to where they are. Do they need help with our research? Do they need our advice? Do they need help with implementations? We show up in the room, not about here's our latest product, or here's a very specific thing that we want to push. We show up for the client. And I think the heritage of our firm, a hundred and fifty-year-old company is client centricity. And so I think when you Bring that together. We can have a conversation with a CIO about their risk, their return, their liquidity. We could talk to them and go deep about real estate. We can talk to them and go deep about private equity and co-investments. We can talk about their total portfolio, that dynamic of meeting the client where they are and having all the tools across that continuum across traditional and alternative assets. It's really important. I'd say from an alt specific point of view, I was actually looking at where the composition of our strengths, if you look at the asset class expertise as a component of our asset center management, we've got specialty advice and implementation capabilities underpinned by research across private equity, private debt, infrastructure, re…

AI assessment note: “heritage of our firm, a hundred and fifty-year-old company is client centricity”

Q How do you think about the staffing capacity model? If one person's touching a client at that senior level, how many different clients can they touch? How many researchers do you need to support that?

A That's a difficult question to ask. It really depends on if you're serving, we call them core clients, where They really rely on our best ideas portfolio that we're doing on behalf of clients from an implementation standpoint. You could probably have 50 plus clients, right? Because it's very systematic the way you've designed it. Now, as you move up the spectrum into more premium and bespoke client service models, then the number of clients you can serve certainly decreases, but the model that we've really tried to develop is folks like Eric and John They're going to be relationship advocate and bringing people below them to really do some of the heavy lifting so that you can give people the experience and exposure and growth opportunity. But I'd say it really depends. It's going to be a funnel where based on the level of service, it's going to decline over time. And then usually as people get more senior, a lot of the heavy lifting on the pacing models or the detailed diligence is done by our pool of analysts across the teams.

AI assessment note: “You could probably have 50 plus clients, right? Because it's very systematic”