Consulting giant sees opportunity to serve global and in-country investors. Investment consulting firm Mercer has followed its on-the-ground move into providing research on China-based asset-management firms managing listed equities, undertaken late last year, with a similar push into India.

The move into Indian-fund research does two things. It gives increasingly nervous global investors a way to access a vast and growing economy. And it provides retail distributors in India a shortcut for populating domestic-consumption investment platforms.

Open up

"As India opens up and invites more foreign investors, it follows that our business establishes a presence on the ground to research investment opportunities for our global institutional and retail intermediary clients," says Tony Cole, head of Mercer's investment consulting business in the Asian-Pacific region.

Mumbai-based Rashmi Mehrotra, head of Mercer's Asian retail-services unit will take on the additional responsibility of leading the investment-consulting initiative in India.

Mehrotra says that India's fast-growing population of high-net-worth investors are demanding and discriminating. "At the same time, private banks face a shortage of qualified and experienced talent such as relationship managers," she adds. "Mercer can help meet the needs of private banks by boosting their internal resources."

India, whose real GDP increased 8.8% in 2006, saw a 20.5% increase in its population of U.S.-dollar millionaires that year, according to industry estimates.

Worldwide, Mercer provides consulting services to more than 2,750 institutional clients with combined assets of more than $3.5 trillion. With offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Bangalore, it has already been providing human-resources consulting services to Indian companies for a decade. -FWR

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