“Opening the Black Box” is our ongoing series on the data treatments, assumptions, and methodologies behind our analyses. In this series, we answer frequently asked questions on how we build, validate, and make decisions about our data.
Thoughts or feedback for us? We welcome it.
What to expect and why it matters
We have been working with institutional investment and administration data for more than three decades. Today, we benchmark over USD 16 trillion in investment assets, track administration costs and service quality for more than 100 million members, and support multiple peer-based communities that commission custom research from us. Behind all of that sit hundreds of thousands of data points analyzed every single year.
For a long time, the mechanics of that work stayed in the background. As our work has grown in complexity, so has the appetite to understand it better. We think that is a healthy evolution, and this series is our response to it.
The work has grown more complex
The institutional investment world looks very different today than it did thirty years ago. The asset classes we track have grown from 22 to 76. The administration activities for which we collect cost data have expanded from 22 to 32. As investments have become more sophisticated and members’ expectations from their administration have evolved, the models and methodologies used to interpret and benchmark them have evolved as well.
You are asking better questions
Our subscribers have recognized it too. More than ever, we receive sharp and specific questions. How do you validate our data? How do you choose peer groups? How do you construct a benchmark cost?
What we will cover
The series will take you through the full scope of our work. We will start with data governance, covering our principles, global reporting standards, and the role subscribers play in the process. From there, we will move into how we deliver data, including our quality process, peer group selection, and how we handle exceptions. We will then go deeper into investments and administration, walking through our taxonomies, methodologies, and how we make comparisons across peers. Later chapters will cover our research and analytics work, the tools and systems we use, including our rules engine, and finally, how all of this flows into the deliverables you receive.
Our goal is to give you a clear view into our data governance approach, our validation processes, and the taxonomies and methodologies that shape our work. We want to give you the knowledge to understand your results with confidence and to ask sharper questions of the insights we deliver. We also welcome your curiosity. The more you understand our work, the more valuable the conversation becomes.
The dialogue starts now
The trust our subscribers have placed in us over the years, many for close to a decade without interruption, is something we take seriously. This series is one way of honouring that trust.
We look forward to hearing from you. If there is a question you would like us to address, please reach out to us at insights@explorecem.com.
This blog is part of our “Opening the Black Box” series. If you’d like to receive new posts in your inbox, please click here to subscribe.