Don Calcagni, Mercer Advisors CIO, explains why they chose to partner with Opto Investments
I'm Don Calcagni, chief investment officer at Mercer Advisors.
So why did we choose to partner with Opto Investments? In my mind, it really comes down to three things. First, philosophy. Opto shares our fiduciary-centered philosophy with respect to not just investing but business in general and how to treat our clients. When we were looking to source a platform to work with, we wanted to work with a platform that is not compensated directly by fund managers. We wanted a platform that was going to work with us to ensure tight alignment in terms of interests between our clients, ourselves, and the different service providers to the funds that we are running. So number one is philosophy.
Number two is partnership. We want to work in close partnership with a subject matter expert where we can collaborate, spitball ideas, and brainstorm to come up with new and innovative ways to take great care of our clients. We have found that in Opto. It's a very collaborative team, very entrepreneurial, and very open to exploring new ideas on how to create better solutions for clients, ensuring those solutions are fully aligned with our fiduciary focus on serving clients at the highest level.
Third, and finally, is the caliber of the people. Everyone at Opto that we have worked with has been exceptionally smart, very experienced, very responsive, and open to exploring new ideas. At Mercer Advisors, we have a philosophy that nobody has a monopoly on good ideas. Engaging with the people at Opto has really challenged us to think in new and different ways regarding how to take wonderful care of our clients. So those are the three things: philosophy, partnership, and people.
Additionally, for advisors, what we have found with the Opto Investments technology is that it is genuinely an end-to-end technology. One of the biggest challenges with advisor adoption in the private market space is that they don't have the tools generally to tell the private markets story. Opto makes that quite easy with their whole proposal engine. In addition to having fund manager due diligence, fact cards, videos, and so on to educate advisors on the offering, what they have that I think is critically important are the tools to help advisors tell that story around how to integrate all of that into a portfolio for our end clients.
In that respect, when you have that type of end-to-end technology, it makes your private markets platform quite scalable. If you can help advisors tell that story, it makes it easier to get that uplift with respect to our private markets program.