Competitive Benchmarking and Optimization
Optimize your product and solution offerings, service models, pricing, and distribution strategies. Learn how we can help you better allocate resources, pursue strategic opportunities, and maximize client relationships.

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Why Cerulli Associates
Enhance Your Market Position
Improve your competitive position with Cerulli’s objective and unparallelled knowledge of the U.S. asset and wealth management markets and their key constituents. Compare your products, services, pricing and resources with those of the broad marketplace, as well as key competitors, to optimize your business. Learn more about Cerulli's advantages:
Data
For more than 30 years, we have captured critical data on the financial services industry and synthesized groundbreaking trends.
Independence
Our ownership structure provides us with an unbiased, objective approach to identifying new market opportunities.
Network
Our vast research network enables us to go to market quickly, testing market assumptions and developing accurate market sizing and sentiment analysis.
Consulting in Action
Client Success Stories
We provide our clients with the results they need to secure their competitive advantage.

CASE STUDY
Advisory Solution Strategy for Global Bank
Cerulli strengthened the competitive positioning for a global private bank, analyzing its advisory service model and platform capabilities against key competitors and delivering recommendations to retain and grow assets. Cerulli’s team evaluated its technology and digital offering, advisor support tools, investment and product capabilities, and advisory fees.

CASE STUDY
Retirement/Wealth Platform Plan for U.S. Wealth Manager
A leading U.S. wealth manager, focused on retirement assets, sought to grow their advisory experience through benchmarking fees and key platform features. Cerulli’s team identified leading capabilities of key competitors to develop a roadmap for the business, which prioritized the most impactful features.

CASE STUDY
Brand Awareness and Competitor Analysis for U.S. Custodian
A large custodian engaged Cerulli to better understand how its U.S. RIA custody offering compares to key entrenched competitors and emerging competitors. The Cerulli team developed a taxonomy of custodial capabilities (e.g., trading, rebalancing, money movement) and leveraged its proprietary Advisor Research Collaborative (ARC) to conduct a custom survey of RIAs. Cerulli delivered perceptional findings on core capabilities, as well as brand awareness metrics.

CASE STUDY
Fee Benchmarking Strategy for U.S. OCIO Provider
A boutique outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) provider sought to benchmark its business against the OCIO space at large, as well as close competitors. Cerulli’s benchmarking analysis included a thorough and complete vetting of the OCIO landscape, resulting in the identification of 13 peers (i.e., a targeted peer group). In addition to building a profile of competitors’ business offerings, Cerulli conducted a fee benchmarking analysis (both of published fees and actual/negotiated fees paid). The Cerulli analysis also included the representative asset allocation of peers and the representative performance of peers, allowing the client to bring published and negotiated fees into context and further hone in on its pricing strategy.
Subject Matter Experts
Meet Our Consultants

Jared F. Baucom
Managing Director, Global Sales & Marketing
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Jared F. Baucom
Managing Director, Global Sales & Marketing
Jared is responsible for global sales, business development, and client service, including oversight of and coordination with the marketing team.
Prior to joining Cerulli, Jared worked as an equity analyst at Baring Asset Management, where he was responsible for the U.S. Utilities sector and also contributed to the U.S. Industrials sector. Prior to Barings, Jared spent two years at State Street Bank.
Full biography here.

Andrew Blake
Associate Director
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Andrew Blake
Associate Director
Andrew is a member of Cerulli’s Wealth Management practice, leading coverage of asset manager distribution strategy for products sold through financial advisors. With a focus on the wealth management landscape, Andrew assesses trends related to advisor use of investment products as well as their relationships with clients and varying practice types.
Prior to joining Cerulli Associates, Andrew worked at John Hancock Investment Management and a Boston-area RIA. He has spent over a decade working with financial advisors and researching distribution best practices.
Full biography here.

Asher Cheses
Director
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Asher Cheses
Director
Asher is a member of Cerulli’s Wealth Management practice, specializing in trends that impact high-end advisory firms and high-net-worth investors. In his role, Asher is responsible for leading various strategic consulting engagements within the wealth management practice, focusing on multi-family offices, RIAs, private banks, and trust companies.
Prior to joining Cerulli, Asher worked as an Investment Analyst at a Boston-based multi-family office, where he conducted fund due diligence and portfolio analysis for high-net-worth investors.
Full biography here.

Michele Giuditta, CFA
Director
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Michele Giuditta, CFA
Director
Michele is a director of the Institutional practice and leads research for annual reports and strategic consulting engagements. She specializes in environmental, social, and governance investing and outsourced CIO research.
Prior to joining Cerulli Associates, Michele worked at Cambridge Associates as an Associate Director in the Client Relationship Management Group. Additionally, she worked at Manulife Asset Management in the Institutional Investment Sales & Services Group, and held roles in Product Management and Client Relationship Management. She began her career as an analyst in the Investment Policy & Research Group at John Hancock.
Full biography here.

Brendan Powers, CFA
Director
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Brendan Powers, CFA
Director
Brendan is a member of Cerulli’s Product Development practice, which focuses on trends related to asset managers’ product development and management functions. This broadly includes assessing the opportunity for product development, evaluating emerging product trends, and understanding distribution and product positioning for investment products across retail and institutional channels.
Prior to joining Cerulli, Brendan worked as a Senior Client Associate at Eaton Vance Management, focusing primarily on the firm’s exchange funds.
Full biography here.

Michael Rose, MST
Director
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Michael Rose, MST
Director
Michael is a director within Cerulli’s Wealth Management practice, where he researches key elements of the wealth management industry, with an emphasis on broker/dealers and wealth management technology. In this capacity, he regularly engages with constituents across the wealth management ecosystem, including retail investors, financial advisors, and executives within wealth management, asset management, and technology firms, in order to support Cerulli’s market research initiatives.
Prior to joining Cerulli, Michael spent eight years working as a financial advisor, providing comprehensive wealth management services to high-net-worth individuals and families. Prior to his role as a financial advisor, Michael served as a research analyst for IDC, where he was responsible for researching trends within the technology industry and advising senior business executives on product strategy.
Full biography here.

Scott Smith
Senior Director
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Scott Smith
Senior Director
With more than 20 years of financial services industry experience, Scott leads Cerulli’s research efforts focused on investor behavior and advisory relationships. In his time at Cerulli, he has authored more than two dozen in-depth reports on topics ranging from wholesale distribution to digital advice platforms. His research helps Cerulli’s clients understand how to optimize their platforms given the evolving demand for financial advice.
Scott started his career wearing a headset at Putnam Investments’ service center in 1996, before moving to more strategic roles at MFS Investment Management starting in 2000, and then to Cerulli in 2007. In addition, he currently serves as member of the CFP Board’s Digital Advice Working Group, and as a judge for the wealthmanagement.com Industry Awards.
Full biography here.

James Tamposi, CFA
Associate Director
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James Tamposi, CFA
Associate Director
James (Jack) is the lead author of The Cerulli Report—North American Institutional Markets and sets the agenda for The Cerulli Edge—U.S. Institutional Edition. Jack has led U.S. market entry strategy and U.S. institutional pricing optimization projects, supporting both foreign and domestic asset managers. During his time at Cerulli, he has contributed to reports across Cerulli’s suite of institutional research, focusing on topics such as insurance general accounts, outsourced chief investment officers, alternative investments, and U.S. subadvisory.
Prior to joining Cerulli, Jack worked as a Research Associate for Chatham Partners.
Full biography here.

Bing Waldert
Managing Director, U.S. Research
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Bing Waldert
Managing Director, U.S. Research
Bing Waldert leads Cerulli’s U.S. Research team comprising seven research practices that cover all elements of the U.S. asset management, wealth management, and retirement markets. He has authored Cerulli reports on the wealth management industry, high-net-worth market, the annuity industry, and retirement markets. He is a frequent board-level and C-suite speaker and well-regarded industry thought leader. He has spoken in front of the Investment Company Institute (ICI), the Asset Management Association of China (AMAC), the Investments and Wealth Institute (IWI), and the Money Management Institute (MMI).
He has worked on client projects on emerging manager expansion strategies, independent registered investment advisors (RIAs), multi-family offices (MFOs), investment platforms, and the outsourced chief investment officer (OCIO) industry. In addition, he has advised multiple private equity firms on acquisitions in the wealth management space.
Full biography here.
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SOLUTIONS BY FIRM TYPE
Firms We Help

Asset Managers
We help institutional and retail asset managers globally understand how and where to expand in an increasingly competitive and fee-compressed environment. Learn how we can help you with your product development and distribution initiatives.

Wealth Management
What products, services, and pricing models will gather and retain investor assets? Cerulli will provide you with the strategic direction you need to help your advisors scale their businesses and help investors achieve better outcomes.

Private Market Firms
Cerulli can help you with each stage of the investment lifecycle—investment due diligence, management of portfolio companies, and product development and distribution into the wealth management industry.

Financial Technology
Cerulli can help you innovate toward the future with comprehensive market sizing and addressability for your services, insight into asset and wealth management trends that impact your business, and technology adoption analysis.