Mercer says Arch cut alternatives costs 40%

Mercer Advisors and Arch say the AI vendor has cut Mercer's cost of running client alternative investments by 40% and saves the firm more than 7,000 hours a year under a multiyear partnership. InvestmentNews first reported the deal on Nov. 6. Mercer is a Denver RIA with $114 billion in client assets.

Separately, Nitrogen said Osaic has approved its full suite of advisor products, AI functions included, for nearly 10,000 financial professionals. Osaic advisors can adopt the Risk Center, Research Center, Income Center, Tax Center, Legacy Center and Insurance Center modules that fit their practices and add others later, according to InvestmentNews.

The two deals move different parts of the desk. At Mercer, private-markets paperwork now lands as structured data and alerts inside the firm's central advisory platform rather than in separate fund administrator portals. Osaic advisors get a menu instead: one module can be switched on without committing to the whole suite, which lets a practice add functions selectively. The due-diligence question for both is vendor concentration — how much of the client record and the alternatives workflow sits with a single outside provider.

Advisor movement at Osaic has been roughly balanced. Moves Wire records 26 moves involving the firm in the past 12 months, including 14 arrivals and 11 departures; the latest was on Nov. 5, when Eric Hansen left Osaic for Envestnet as senior vice president of marketing. Tooling that shortens paperwork is one lever a large platform can put in front of a practice, though whether it changes an advisor's decision to stay is not something the move data shows.

Arch collects the documents private investments generate and public securities do not — capital calls, distribution notices, K-1s and general partner updates — converts them into structured data and routes them to the teams and systems that act on them. K-1s go to each client's accountant, capital calls get processed, and figures flow into Mercer's reporting tools. Advisors and clients receive alerts on distributions, general partner commentary and news about underlying portfolio companies.

"Arch has become a key component of our private investments platform and operations, bringing critical investment data into our central advisory platform and giving advisors and clients real-time visibility into private investments, much like they already have with public markets," said Don Calcagni, Mercer's chief investment officer.

The arrangement also supports Mercer's acquisition strategy. Each firm it buys brings its own mix of private holdings and its own way of managing them, including complex family-office portfolios, and Arch lets Mercer pull those assets into one operating and reporting model tied to Aspen Investing, the firm's in-house direct indexing platform. Mercer says prospective partner firms and clients cite its private investment capabilities as a reason to join.