Mumbai: Mercer, one of the world's largest investment consulting firms, has launched its investment consulting business in India.

Mercer will commence operations by researching India-based asset management and portfolio management service firms managing listed equities.  This will complement its comprehensive global research coverage and form part of the investment consulting advice Mercer already provides to institutional clients worldwide. 

Mercer's global investment consulting business provides services to over 2,750 clients with assets of over $3.5 trillion, in around 35 countries.

Mercer provides investment advice and tools to institutional investors such as pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, insurers, foundations and endowments and, increasingly, retail intermediaries such as private banks and multi-manager funds.

Tony Cole, Mercer Worldwide Partner and Business Leader for Mercer's investment consulting business in the Asia Pacific, said that expanding into India was a natural progression for the business after it started operations in China a few months ago.

"Like China, as India opens up and invites more foreign investors, it follows that our business establishes a presence on the ground to research investment opportunities for our global institutional and retail intermediary clients.  Local presence will also help us evaluate the effect the growth of India has on the performance of other asset classes," Cole said.

"As a global firm, we harness the resources of 610 consultants which include 56 dedicated asset manager researchers to share information with the investment consulting business across the globe to provide best practice solutions in each market. Even though we are a new business in India, our established global practices enable us to hit the ground running and begin to provide meaningful services to Indian investors immediately." Cole explained.

Mercer has appointed Rashmi Mehrotra as its business leader for investment consulting in India, and head of the retail services unit for Asia Pacific. She, along with a dedicated team, will provide investment-consulting services to the Indian market. The focus will be on retail intermediaries such as private banks and wealth management firms. Rashmi Mehrotra has over 15 years of experience as a Chartered Financial Analyst (CFA) and had helped set up the retail offer in Australia four years ago.  She is currently rolling out an enhanced offer across Asia.

Mercer has already appointed two research analysts in Mumbai, and is looking to hire more analysts with experience in alternative asset classes.

"India's high net worth population growth is one of the fastest in the world. Indian HNW investors are also amongst the most demanding and sophisticated clients.  They demand institutional quality investment research at prices that represent good value to them.  At the same time, private banks face a shortage of qualified and experienced talent such as relationship managers. Mercer can help meet the needs of private banks by boosting their internal resources with Mercer's high quality, global institutional research, tools, which deliver this research efficiently and targeted investment training for their staff." Mehrotra said.  

Mercer has invited asset managers in all asset classes (including listed equities, debt, infrastructure, real estate and private equity) to register on its global investment manager research database GIMD that enables its research team to initiate research coverage. 

The GIMD database subscribers account for over $2.9 trillion of assets under management or advisement with the geographical distribution roughly one-third from each of the Americas, Europe and Asia Pacific.  Approximately a third of GIMD subscribers are government agencies, one quarter are managers-of-managers and the remainder are largely plan sponsors.

"The Mercer GIMD platform is not only the central resource that Mercer consultants use to provide advice to clients, but approximately 80 large institutional investors subscribe to GIMD to access the research and information it contains on investment managers research.Through highlighting the capabilities of Indian managers on GIMD we are providing their firm the opportunity to benefit from exposure to our clients globally," Mr Cole said.

Mercer's Indian business has been providing HR-related advice to Indian corporates for 10 years. It has more than 150 staff across 4 offices in Delhi (Gurgaon), Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore.