Mercer Advisors completes Aspen Investing rollout with in-house direct indexing

Mercer Advisors has completed the rollout of Aspen Investing, a proprietary investment platform that puts the firm's centralized portfolio management directly in front of every advisory team in its network. The Denver-based RIA announced the update Tuesday.

Aspen Investing now functions as the investment engine of Aspen, the technology system Mercer uses to coordinate planning, tax and estate work. It draws on what the firm describes as a centralized investment platform of more than $100 billion. Mercer developed the platform with wealth technology provider Orion; the coverage names no other outside technology partner.

Mercer's own investment team now builds and manages the direct indexing portfolios inside Aspen Investing — accounts in which clients own the individual stocks of an index rather than a fund that tracks it. The platform harvests tax losses daily and lets an advisor set a capital gains tax budget for a client. It can also work around low-basis legacy holdings. Mercer additionally cites support for proposal generation, advanced reporting with proprietary business intelligence and risk monitoring.

Portfolios sit inside unified managed accounts, which hold strategies from multiple third-party managers in a single account and consolidate reporting. Advisors can align each portfolio with a client's financial plan and layer on tax management, security-level exclusions or additions, values-based screens and alternative investment allocations.

The announcement disclosed no specifics on fee levels or projected savings, though Mercer says the platform is meant to lower portfolio costs through strategic relationships with asset managers. That leaves the comparison a principal would want — what the customization charges against what it saves — absent from the public material.

Donald Calcagni, Mercer's chief investment officer, who leads an investing force of more than 125 professionals, cast the offering in institutional terms: "Aspen Investing was designed to give every client access to the kind of portfolio management typically reserved for endowments and large institutions, delivered in a way that reflects their specific goals and circumstances." President Daniel Gourvitch framed the launch as a break from standardized model portfolios.

The low-basis capability doubles as an acquisition tool, Mercer's framing suggests: it applies both to clients with large unrealized gains and to advisory firms joining Mercer through acquisition. In practice, an incoming firm's clients could move onto Mercer's investment engine without first selling appreciated positions, which likely makes the handoff cheaper than a liquidation. The announcement did not quantify that effect, and it gave no indication of how many acquired firms' clients have been placed on the platform.