Now there are three research houses

Mercer Investment Consulting is expanding. The company has signed up its first retail research client and is about to launch a master trust.

Tuesday, March 24th 1998, 12:00AM

Just as some people start asking if there is room for two managed fund research houses in New Zealand another player enters the market.
Mercer Investment Consulting is expanding its services, which were traditionally supplied to the wholesale and trustee market, by selling fund manager research to financial planners.
It has recently signed up AdvisorGroup as its first retail client.
Mercer Consulting chief executive Louis Boulanger says the company is now the investment consultant to AdvisorGroup's master trust company Private Portfolio Services.

He says Mercer will supply quantitative and qualitative research to the group, along with performance attribution analysis.
"We are there to help them manage the managers," he says.
Boulanger says Mercer will be active in its research; "when and if something sufficiently important happens and (AdvisorGroup) need to make a decision quickly we are there."
Before this move the independent financial market was the domain of FPG Research and IPAC Securities.
Boulanger says Mercer's move pits it head to head with these two groups, however both of them had been active in wholesale/trustee side of the business.
While AdvisorGroup is Mercer's first retail client, it won't be the last, Boulanger says.
In a second development Mercer is also about to launch a master trust product aimed at corporates who want to get out of the superannuation business and trustees.
The Mercer Retirement Trust (MRT) has been successfully launched in Australia where it has about A$220 million under management.
Boulanger hopes the New Zealand version of the MRT will be up and running in about a month's time.
Currently the company is waiting on regulatory approval for the MRT.
On top of these two developments Mercer is likely to enter the master custodian business in the near future.

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