Global financial services firm Russell Investments has hired Matt Wacher to lead its index development in Australia and New Zealand.
Wacher has over 15 years' financial markets experience and joins Russell from CMC Markets in Tokyo, where he was head of institutional sales and products.
His responsibilities include taking several new indexes to the market in the next year and working with clients and prospects to develop custom benchmarks.
"Matt's appointment allows us to maximise the benefit of Russell's strength in index design and construction for the benefit of local institutional clients, investment managers and product developers," Russell Investments Australasia chief executive Chris Corneil said.
Corneil said Australian clients were following in the footsteps of United States institutions and increasingly demanding custom indexes that more closely matched their investment strategies.
"Today investors of every size are fundamentally reviewing their risk appetites and moving away from pure-return approaches in favour of more thoughtful outcome-oriented solutions," he said.
This week, Russell launched so-called investment discipline indexes in the US designed to target commonly practised approaches to stock selection used by fund managers.
The approaches covered by the indexes include aggressive growth, consistent growth, equity income, low price/earnings and contrarian investing.
"The launch of the investment discipline indexes is just one example of the innovations Russell has developed internationally in indexes and an indication of the type of strategies Russell may look to develop for the Australian market," Corneil said.
"Russell will also be looking to target investment banks, ETF providers and fund managers with its Australian indexes."
Those clients were looking for support in building investable products that relied on an index, such as ETFs, he said.
