Investment consulting with your future in mind.

Our investment consultancy services give clients specific guidance at every stage of investment decision-making, risk management and monitoring. In fact, we have been helping pension funds, endowments, foundations and other investors for more than 50 years. Our global scale allows our clients to benefit from our experiences in other pensions markets and to be fully supported in ever evolving investment markets and changing regulatory environment.

We create value by equipping our investment consultants with extensive global research and intellectual capital. Consultants bring Mercer’s best ideas to meet specific client situations. You can tailor our services to your needs, opting for anything from research and advice, through to specialist solutions including fiduciary management.

Globally, Mercer provides investment advice to over 3,900 clients, with more than $17 trillion in assets. In Ireland specifically, we have more than 250 clients, with combined assets totalling over €50 billion.[1]

At the heart of our investment consulting is our global research. A significant number of colleagues globally carry out investment manager research. What’s more, our strategic research group of about 40 senior people globally develops forward-looking, dynamic ideas to improve the positioning of client portfoliios.

Over the years, we have built a number of specialist teams. That means our investment consultants can offer you a range of specialist resources.

Institutional investors have rarely faced such challenges. Today’s uncertain market environment is creating potential headwinds for achieving your investment goals and it has become more important than ever to build resilience and prepare for a range of outcomes. Meanwhile, sustainable investing is evolving and regulations are ever changing. There’s a greater need than ever for specialist guidance, expertise and monitoring.

Portfolio structures that have worked well for the past two decades are being tested as never before by these challenges. Institutions need to respond by stress-testing their strategies and addressing challenges in the following areas:

• Understanding market trends and how they might affect your ability to achieve your investment objectives. At the same time, positioning portfolios to benefit from medium-term market opportunities.
• Reviewing asset return assumptions and correlation factors to ensure proper diversification is achieved.
• Developing a robust risk management dashboard that provide investors with relevant risk indicators and metrics.  
• Monitoring funding levels regularly to avail of market opportunities to reduce risk and carrying out asset-liability management projections to assess the impact of changes in interest rates and inflation expectations.
•  For defined benefit pension schemes, finding the best way to manage, reduce or remove risk as they move along the path to the end of their journeys.
•  Identifying and selecting best-in-class asset managers, supported by the output of a global manager research capability.
•  Developing and implementing sustainable investment policies through a robust and holistic framework. Framing policies that will adapt to changes in regulations and market practice as they evolve.
•  Finding ways to improve governance and reduce operating costs. Taking an analytical approach can realise significant efficiencies in areas such as custody and securities lending, asset transitions and operations generally.

Beyond addressing these challenges, it’s important to monitor changes in your portfolios as well as in regulations. Do you have best-in-class portfolio analytics? Are you following the latest governance and regulatory updates?

Important notices

1  As at 30 June, 2021