Consulting Services
We help our clients uncover opportunities to grow their businesses by matching their competitive strengths with market needs. Independently owned, Cerulli’s strategic consulting is rooted in our 30+ years of providing industry-leading research, data, insights, and unmatched subject matter expertise.
Consulting
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Consulting Services
As an independent firm, we partner with our clients to understand their competitive strengths, market position, and growth aspirations. We use our specialization, proprietary data, professional network, and tenured staff to guide our clients to successful outcomes. Let our legacy of industry expertise, data infrastructure, and objectivity fuel your next phase of growth.
Cerulli Associates
By the Numbers
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years in business
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out of the top-50 asset managers as clients
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executive research calls annually
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financial advisors in network
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. Expand your product development and distribution initiatives with our guidance.
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.
How we help
Our Capabilities
Competitive Benchmarking and Optimization
Improve your competitive position with Cerulli’s objective and unparallelled knowledge of the U.S. asset and wealth management markets. Compare your products, services, pricing, and resources with those of the broad marketplace to optimize your business.
Consumer Insights and Segmentation
Cerulli’s quantitative and qualitative approach to gathering client data and insights can help you develop a sound customer segmentation strategy based on quantifiable factors. Optimize your solutions, service models, pricing, and distribution strategies to meet client demand.
Custom Research
Created specifically for your business needs, Cerulli’s custom research provides distinct market insights into your particular innovation, enables unique brand awareness, and access to hard-to-reach industry participants. Cerulli ensures that every project is executed with precision.
Distribution and Marketing Strategy
Build a scalable distribution model with the help of Cerulli's distribution and marketing expertise. We can help you assess your product positioning, optimize fees and share classes, define optimal channel targets, evaluate staffing levels, and evaluate how your clients perceive your brand.
Investment Product Development and Management
Analyze demand, distribution, and innovation across products and vehicles—including mutual funds, exchange-traded fund (ETFs), bonds, alternative investments, separately managed accounts (SMAs), and asset allocation models—for continuous innovation.
Market Entry and Expansion
Align your business model to capture new market opportunities. We can help you identify products, client channels, and geographies that will lead to marketshare growth. Pinpoint your next market expansion initiative and establish your growth plan.
Pricing and Profitability
Improve profitability with the right pricing strategy across products, platforms, and markets. Cerulli’s data collected on various factors impacting pricing—vehicles, assets under management (AUM), fees, distribution partners, and plan types—can help you optimize pricing and bolster profit margins.
Post-Merger Integration
Optimize corporate structures and integrate affiliate businesses for value creation and scale. Cerulli can help you evaluate opportunities for scale; expand or rationalize business resources; and leverage combined capabilities to advance your competitive position.
M&A Due Diligence
Cerulli’s extensive knowledge and unparalleled data covering the asset management, wealth management, and retirement industries—and their constituents—provides buy-side and sell-side firms with strategic intelligence needed pre- and post-transaction.
Connect With Us
Learn more about how our consulting services can help you.
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Meet Our Team
Subject Matter Experts
Bing Waldert
Managing Director, U.S. Research
Bio →
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.
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.
Stephen Caruso
Associate Director
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Stephen Caruso
Associate Director
Stephen is a Associate Director in the Wealth Management practice where he leads research into the registered investment advisor (RIA) channels. As part of his research, he is the author of Cerulli’s U.S. RIA Marketplace report and has written on topics including private equity investment in RIAs and the role staff play in RIAs’ pursuit of scale.
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.
Shawn O'Brien, CFA
Director
Bio →
Shawn O'Brien, CFA
Director
Shawn oversees the Retirement practice at Cerulli Associates. In this role, Shawn oversees and mentors a team of analysts responsible for publishing research on the trends in defined contribution (DC) and IRA markets. Additionally, Shawn provides strategic oversight to Cerulli’s consulting projects focused on opportunities in the retirement space. Shawn frequently speaks at industry summits and conferences. Shawn is also responsible for overseeing the firm’s Data Analytics team.
Prior to joining Cerulli Associates, Shawn was a researcher at Harvard Business School where he co-authored case studies alongside professors Adi Sunderam and Luis M. Viceira focused on investment management for individual and institutional investors. Shawn started his career in investment operations at SSgA where he covered the firm’s equity collective investment trusts and institutional separate accounts.
Full biography here.
Brendan Powers, CFA
Director
Bio →
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
Bio →
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.
Daniil Shapiro, CFA
Director
Bio →
Daniil Shapiro, CFA
Director
Daniil is part of Cerulli’s Product Development practice, where he works on the identification, analysis, and reporting of asset management industry trends with a focus on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and alternative investments.
Prior to joining Cerulli Associates, Daniil was part of the Product Management and Business Intelligence teams with the MainStay Funds, part of New York Life Investment Management. At MainStay, Daniil supported sales efforts via fund and ETF competitive analysis, product research, and development of marketing materials, as well as performance reporting. Before New York Life, Daniil was part of the risk management practice at Accenture, and held risk and compliance roles at HSBC’s investment bank.
Full biography here.
Scott Smith
Director
Bio →
Scott Smith
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
Bio →
James Tamposi, CFA
Associate Director
James (Jack) is the lead author of Cerulli’s North American Institutional Markets report 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.
Jared F. Baucom
Managing Director, Global Sales & Marketing
Bio →
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.
Thought Leadership
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