• CutterBenchmarking Overview
• Benefits
• CutterBenchmarking Members
• How does it Work?
• What do Members receive?
• What makes CutterBenchmarking Different?

CutterBenchmarking Overview
World-class investment firms consistently strive for excellence across their entire organizations. These firms employ best practices that optimize value by reducing risk, maximizing efficiency and containing costs.  They continually ask themselves:

• What can I do to make my operations more effective?
• How do my firm’s capabilities rank alongside my competitors?
• Where have our investments been most successful?
• How can I reduce my operational, regulatory and technology risk?
• Which areas should I improve next?

Benefits
CutterBenchmarking uses a sound and rigorous process to help global asset management firms understand their investment processing capabilities relative to the industry. This service examines effectiveness for seven to eight specific investment processing functions each year.

How Does it Work?
CutterBenchmarking members spend approximately ½ day completing a detailed questionnaire that is submitted to Cutter. Each survey contains between 75 and 150 multiple-choice questions that are categorized into metrics. Cutter aggregates and scores firm responses based upon a "best in class" Evaluation Matrix that has been developed with the assistance of the Advisory Board.

What do Members receive?

1. A comprehensive survey structured in an ideal business plan format.
2. A detailed report that contains the benchmark results of each of the CutterBenchmarking members. Accompanying these benchmarks is a written analysis and commentary that provides insights about the results. All results are anonymized to protect each firm's privacy of this critical operational data.
3. A customized report that provides actionable observations that each participant can use to improve their business. Each report highlights areas in which the firm significantly exceeds, and trails, the performance of its peer group.
4. The detailed responses submitted of each member and a copy of the Evaluation Matrix (fully anonymized)
5. An exclusive review with a Cutter subject-matter expert to discuss the results and identify methods to improve operational performance.
   

What makes CutterBenchmarking Different?
Focus on Capabilities – Rather then focusing on how much firms spend on technology, this service measures the effectiveness of each participant's investment processing capabilities. This approach allows process effectivenes to be compared across different business models, product types, customer mixes and asset classes.

Collaborative effort with Market Leaders – The detailed data elements and metrics underlying the benchmarks are vetted by an Advisory Board of ten industry-leading firms to ensure that the results produced by this service are meaningful.

Participation of Market Leaders – Benchmarking is meaningful because we have a critical mass of market-leading firms. The Chief Operating Officers and Senior Operations Managers that make up our members manage 50% of all assets in the world.

Developed by Cutter Associates, an Industry Specialist – CutterResearch and CutterConsulting ensure that the service addresses are on target and concentrate on the issues that are meaningful to the industry.

Designed and Managed by an Industry Expert – This service was designed and is managed by the benchmarking expert who founded the benchmarking practice at Forrester Research.