Products April 27, 2011

Russell Develops Tool for Measuring Business Success

Russell Investments launched the Advisor Health Index, a tool that provides financial advisers with a high-level "health" assessment of their practice in comparison to other advisory firms.
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The Advisor Health Index score is calculated against one of five categories based on how a financial advisory firm is structured and its business life-cycle stage. A firm is then benchmarked against category peers across five strategic business measures, weighted according to Russell’s view on their importance to an advisory firm’s growth and success: total revenue per client, recurring revenue percentage, turn (revenue/AUM), active clients per FTE, and AUM per client.  

The Advisor Health Index prompts advisers to answer seven questions about their practice, Russell explained in the announcement. The tool identifies a category benchmark based on practices with similar attributes and then outputs a score between 0 and 100 that reflects how the firm compares to the top quartile practices within the respective category.   

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Higher scores indicate that the practice’s metrics match up more closely to those of the top firms in the same category. A lower score indicates that in some key performance areas, a practice differs from high-performing category peers. In addition to the overall index score, the adviser also receives detail on how the firm is benchmarked against each of the five strategic business measures. 

The Advisor Health Index benchmark data is derived from a custom dataset of 534 firms with $25 million or more in assets under management drawn from the InvestmentNews/Moss Adams 2010 Financial Study of Advisory Firms, conducted by Moss Adams, LLP. Within this dataset, prepared for Russell Investments by Best Practice Research, benchmark data represents mean values of high profit firms (top quartile practices in terms of pre-tax income per owner).  

“The Advisor Health Index is designed to help advisers better understand the business measures that can drive profitability and ultimately, the growth and success of their firms,” said Sam Ushio, practice management consultant for Russell’s U.S. adviser-sold business.
Deals & People April 27, 2011

State Street Adds to Derivatives Team

State Street Corporation announced that Charles Cooper has joined the company as senior managing director of State Street’s eExchange derivatives program.
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Cooper will lead eExchange’s efforts to respond to market changes stemming from the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill. He will work with clients to ensure the continued success of existing products and build new trading and settlement offerings to comply with the evolving regulatory landscape.   

He is based in New York and reports to Clifford Lewis, executive vice president and head of State Street’s eExchange business, a division of State Street Global Markets.   

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According to the announcement, Cooper most recently worked at Deutsche Bank AG in London, where he served as global head of Legal Operations in the risk management division. Prior to joining Deutsche, Cooper spent more than two years as chief operating officer and chief of staff for the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), the federal regulator charged with overseeing the futures and options industries in the United States.  In that capacity, he served as the Commission’s senior staff representative on the President’s Working Group on Financial markets.  From January 2004 through August 2005, Cooper served as special assistant and chief spokesman to Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz at the Pentagon. 

Cooper earned both a bachelor’s degree (government) and a juris doctor degree from Georgetown University in Washington, DC.

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