2020 Institutional Investor Productivity Report

Long before the COVID-19 pandemic upended life as we know it, institutional investing was already a demanding field that attracted highly educated professionals to strategically allocate assets and deliver superior risk-adjusted returns for their members, annuitants, employees or organizations.

Because institutional investors’ time is so valuable, Backstop Solutions and Mercer have teamed up to study how institutional investors are spending it. In this first-of-its-kind study, we discovered that institutional investors spend approximately 30% of their time on tasks that not only do not add value to the investment process, but also could be automated or streamlined with better technology.

In this report, we present our findings on the demands on institutional investors’ time, including variations in AUM, type of investment model and type of organization — and where there may be room for improvement.