Overview
Managing a $1.8 billion endowment with just three people presents unique challenges. Yet, Chief Investment Officer Rip Mecherle and his team deftly handles everything from investment decisions and performance reporting to financial operations and tax compliance across holding, composite, and total portfolio levels. In 2024, Rip chose eVestment to bolster the team’s ability to report portfolio attributes, exposures, and manager performance to its eight-person investment committee.
The following question and answer conversation with Rip details the team’s process and evolution, and where they plan to go next using Nasdaq eVestment.
Nasdaq eVestment
How has your approach to manager review evolved?
Rip Mecherle - A. Years ago, UT’s public equity and fixed income allocations concentrated on mutual funds, where basic asset allocation software sufficed. However, as we evolved into sophisticated institutional investments—commingled funds, hedge funds, and complex strategies—we outgrew our existing toolset.
We specifically needed:
- Deeper manager/strategy coverage for sourcing
- Reporting across diverse product ranges
- Return stream and holdings data access
- Institutional-grade benchmarks and peer analysis capabilities
- Intuitive interface requiring minimal staff time
- Elimination of manual data loading and maintenance
How did the Nasdaq eVestment transform your manager process?
Nasdaq eVestment™ transformed our workflow into a streamlined process. We can now research numerous funds without worrying about licensing complexities, index alignment, or platform connectivity issues. When manager holdings aren't pre-loaded, a simple request resolves it instantly. Ready-made index and comparison sets eliminate significant manual work.
Previously, even our internal portfolio management system required manual uploads for public equity and fixed income exposures—hedge fund data wasn't available at all. Public equity alone might involve hundreds of thousands of global holdings across multiple funds. With Nasdaq eVestment, 90% of this information is immediately accessible.
The platform's intuitive design allowed our intern to conduct investment analysis within a day of gaining access.
What's been the quality of manager data you get now?
Nasdaq eVestment consistently delivers high-quality data. Every manager analysis we've conducted—examining holdings, return streams, and multiple offerings—has proven accurate when compared against SEC filings and alternative platforms.
The depth of data has surprised us at times. For example, we invest in a fund of closed-end funds, and the extent of holdings data available in eVestment was tremendously helpful.
Has adding a new platform impacted your expense ratio?
Financially, Nasdaq eVestment has helped us keep our expense ratio low. The breadth of data available has enabled us to offset approximately half the cost of eVestment by consolidating disparate subscriptions. Consolidating these subscriptions has also eliminated time-consuming vendor contract negotiations, which can be particularly challenging given our public status.
And with Nasdaq eVestment combined holdings-level and returns-based analysis capabilities, we’ve significantly reduced our workload around labor-intensive tasks such as loading and retrieving holdings data and running complex analyses.
Do you have Nasdaq eVestment integrated with any other platforms?
Our Nasdaq eVestment Venn integration proved transformative. We now conduct rapid risk assessments on our largest portfolio component—public equity—at both manager and composite levels. Without this functionality, maintaining such frequent data analysis would require a full-time position, which would cost us, conservatively, $90 to $100K.
What's been the impact on your portfolio?
For a small team covering all aspects of investment research, portfolio operations, accounting, and reporting, monitoring was a constant challenge amid changing market trends, economic shifts, and manager variables. Nasdaq eVestment provides deep manager-level insights that streamline all aspects of manager work: sourcing, due diligence, roster assembly, and ongoing monitoring.
For our marketable investments—public fixed income, public equity, and hedge funds—Nasdaq eVestment delivers comprehensive cross-asset class information for portfolio optimization.
Most importantly, the platform better illuminates how our investments work together. This holistic view has profoundly impacted both short and long-term strategy development.
Has Nasdaq eVestment impacted your ability to conduct peer comparisons?
Nasdaq eVestment has expanded our peer comparison capabilities, better equipping us to evaluate prospective managers and perform thorough screenings unhindered by data access limitations. Nasdaq eVestment effectively provides the analytical power of one to two additional team members.
The peer benchmarking functionality within eVestment supports long-term strategic comparisons for public equity and fixed income positioning, and hedged strategy exposures. Ready-made tools and reports simplify peer group assembly and manager comparisons, improving ongoing surveillance and providing superior institutional comparison sets.
Beyond manager benchmarking, Nasdaq eVestment enables self-benchmarking. Cost comparison capabilities are crucial for institutional management. We closely monitor our expense ratios against peers, and understanding the competitive fee landscape proves invaluable. Nasdaq eVestment most easily facilitates marketplace cost comparisons.
How do you see your usage of this platform evolving in the future?
While recognizing untapped platform potential, our small team prioritized essential manager due diligence and surveillance upon implementation. Future plans include deeper data and analytics utilization for sourcing, layering qualitative data with quantitative analysis, and maximizing Venn integration.
We also see significant potential for public equity composite construction applications.
The Nasdaq eVestment team's proactive feature recommendations and genuine curiosity about our needs creates a true partnership dynamic, establishing eVestment as a permanent fixture in our operations.
Ready to get Nasdaq eVestment for your Endowment? Let's talk.
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