Deals & People January 13, 2009

Aon Names Benefits Practice Leader for the Americas

Aon Consulting Worldwide announced that Francois Choquette will join the Global Benefits practice as senior vice president and leader of the Americas team, which covers the United States, Canada, and Latin America.
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Choquette will be responsible for continuing to build the global benefits service offerings, brand, and talent in the Americas, according to the announcement. He will join the firm on January 20, 2009, and will be based in San Francisco.

Choquette has worked for Mercer for 20 years, developing expertise in a broad range of international human resources areas including mergers and acquisitions, global compensation and benefit design, global actuarial, global governance policies, multinational pooling, and employee mobility. Most recently, he led Mercer’s International Retirement Specialty Group for the Americas and its West Coast International Group.

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“As organizations look for ways to control costs in their new or expanding global operations, Francois’ leadership and expertise in international consulting will help provide clients with the best solutions to meet their needs,” said Piyush Chaudhari, Aon Consulting’s Global Benefits practice leader, in the announcement.

Products January 13, 2009

Performance Attribution Analysis Added to Morningstar Direct

Morningstar, Inc. has launched its latest version of Morningstar Direct, a Web-based research platform that connects institutional investment professionals to Morningstar's investment research and data.
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According to a press release, the most significant addition to Morningstar Direct is performance attribution analysis, allowing users to quantify and analyze the impact of portfolio decisions, like sector weighting or security selection, on equity performance. Users can perform attribution analysis on their own private portfolios, imported as frequently as daily, in addition to the more than 30,000 actively managed equity investments in the Morningstar database.

Performance attribution analysis examines differences in performance between an actively managed portfolio and a benchmark, and attempts to explain relative under- or over-performance in terms of a managers’ region, sector, style, or market-cap weightings, and security selection, Morningstar said. In Morningstar Direct, users can benchmark performance to another fund, a custom or blended peer group, a Morningstar Category, or a selection from more than 30,000 indexes.

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Performance attribution can be used by asset managers to explain stock selection and weighting decisions. Consultants and institutional investors can use Morningstar Direct’s performance attribution analysis as part of their due diligence research during the investment selection process.

More information is available at www.global.morningstar.com/MorningstarDirect.

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