One of the major trends over the past decade among Long-Term Investors (LTIs), such as pension funds and government funds, has been to move towards a more direct method of investing. The financial crisis of 2008-09 accelerated this ‘disintermediation', in particular within long-term private...

The increasing complexity and de-localization of finance has allowed for an obfuscation of fees and costs that asset managers charge to asset owners. This obfuscation has, in turn, led to a distortion in the underlying incentives that asset owners set for the capitalist system. In this chapter,...

The global financial crisis and its aftermath put into sharp relief the structure and performance of the global financial services industry. Questions have been raised as to what intermediaries separately and together add to the production of investment returns and social welfare (in general)....

Through a multi-modal empirical analysis of the data-management experiences of large institutional investors (‘Giants'), we find that these entities are struggling to: 1) utilize data efficiently; and 2) consistently achieve desired levels of data quality. We use these findings to design a new...

A growing number of institutional investors are unhappy with the exposures they have to long-term alternative asset classes, such as private equity, infrastructure and real estate. This frustration has little to do with the underlying assets. Rather, it relates to the sub-optimal access points...

Innovation and Energy are likely to be two of the most attractive investment themes in the coming years. The world is moving to an increasingly technical and digital age, and the search for renewable sources of energy intensifies as the detrimental impacts of climate change increase in frequency...

As alternative data steadily become mainstream in finance, institutional investors may benefit from rethinking how they engage with alternative datasets. Specifically, they could gain from rethinking 1) alternative data's value proposition, 2) how they characterize alternative data, and 3) how...

US state and local public employee retirement systems (PERS) utilise various models of contract with distinctive features in their form and substantive content in relation to industry norms. These models differ between states, within states, and even between PERS within major metropolitan areas....

The Alberta Investment Management Corporation (AIMCo) was established in 2008 to manage approximately C$70 billion on behalf of 26 pension, endowment, and government reserve funds in the Province of Alberta. The fund's over-arching goal is to earn incremental return on risk over what our clients...

A growing number of institutional investors, persistent in their desire to dis-intermediate and align interests with their portfolio managers, are turning away from external asset managers and are instead looking to one another for assistance. These direct investors are hoping to overcome the...