Deals & People February 3, 2011

Towers Watson Announces Investment Team Changes

Towers Watson has hired Michael Hall as West Division Investment Leader.
Reported by

Hall is charged with overseeing investment advice and implementation to pension plan sponsors and institutional investors in the western United States. Hall’s appointment is effective March 1.  

In addition, the company promoted several current associates to new and expanded roles, effective immediately: Matthew Stroud to the newly created position of Head of Strategy and Portfolio Construction, North America; Weston Tompkins, East Division Investment Leader; Marko Komarynsky, Head of Manager Research, U.S.; Diya Luke, New York Office Investment Leader, and Hillary Bolton, Atlanta Office Investment Leader.   

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According to the company, Hall joins Towers Watson after 13 years at Russell Investments Americas, where he was most recently Director of Investment Strategy. Prior to joining Russell, Hall held consulting positions with Northern Trust Retirement Consulting and Buck Consultants.   

In his new role, Stroud, who has 19 years of capital markets and investment advisory experience, will help clients develop strategies and portfolios based on their objectives, consistent with the company’s views on capital markets and investment opportunities. Stroud, Towers Watson’s New York office Investment Leader for the past five years, is a member of the company’s Global Investment Committee.   

Tompkins, who was Southeast Investment Leader since joining Towers Watson in 2006, will assume the East responsibilities held by Christopher DeMeo, who is now head of investment for North America. Prior to joining Towers Watson, Tompkins spent 10 years at Hewitt Investment Group, seven years of which were spent as Chair of the company’s U.S. manager research group. Before that, he held analytical positions at New England Pension Consultants and the Principal/EGT. .   

Most recently, Komarynsky, who has more than two decades of experience, was Towers Watson’s director of U.S. fixed-income manager research. He joined the company in 2005 as a fixed income specialist, after holding fixed income analyst and portfolio manager positions at EVEREN Securities, Bank of America and Harris Trust and Savings Bank. Komarynsky was also a manager of research at Morgan Stanley Graystone Research.   

Luke joined Towers Watson in 2004 as a senior analyst, a post she also held at Mercer. Bolton also joined the company in 2004, as a consultant. She had client-facing roles at Vanguard, Towers Perrin and Mercer.
Products February 3, 2011

MSSB Offers Benchmarking Services for DC Plans

Morgan Stanley Smith Barney announced that detailed fee and service benchmarking tools have been added to its defined contribution retirement plans.
Reported by

This new capability, powered by Fiduciary Benchmarks, will enable Morgan Stanley Smith Barney’s Corporate Retirement Directors (CRDs) to provide insight to plan sponsors about their plan’s fees and services. CRDs are financial advisers who focus on serving retirement plan sponsors.  

Edward O’Connor, Managing Director of Morgan Stanley Smith Barney Retirement Services, said in the announcement: “Plan sponsors have an obligation to ensure that the fees they pay service providers are reasonable. Comparing and evaluating plan fees and services to those of other similar plans – is one way to help plan fiduciaries determine what is “reasonable.” While this may seem like a daunting task for plan sponsors, our CRDs can help them identify and understand specific plan fees, leverage Fiduciary Benchmark’s data and benchmarking capabilities to conduct an apples-to-apples comparison, and ultimately evaluate the effectiveness of their plan from both a quantitative as well as a qualitative perspective.”  

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The company noted the demand for fee benchmarking services has been on the rise since the release of the interim final 408(b)(2) regulation on July 16, 2010, requiring the disclosure of fees and services related to retirement plans. 

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