In May 2001 the world's first space tourist, Dennis Tito, found himself in the glare of television lights, saying such things as, "I want people to perceive me as a serious man who had a dream and pursued it in the face of great difficulty." But after his eight-day, $20 million stay on the International Space Station, complete with round-trip travel on a Russian Soyuz, Tito returned to his day job as chairman and CEO of investment management and consulting firm Wilshire Associates -- and to challenges of a different sort. Within months Tito launched into what he calls an "overall review of the strategic direction" of the Santa Monica, Californiabased firm, the dimensions of which began to emerge only last month in two transactions with Bank of New York. On September 21, Wilshire said it had agreed to sell its brokerage arm to the bank's BNY Securities Group; the next day it said it would integrate its Wilshire Analytics risk management business -- including much-in-demand compliance, performance attribution and risk budgeting tools -- with BoNY's global risk services division. The upshot: 300-employee Wilshire, which Tito, 63, admits has been "very deliberate in its decisions," has decided that technology, investment consulting and investment management services are its core businesses.
The specifics of the brokerage deal, including the price, weren't disclosed. Explains BoNY president Gerald Hassell, "They just didn't have the scale to make it worth keeping, and we do." Still, both sides wax eloquent on the risk linkup, which will have a combined 600 institutional clients with a total of $14 trillion under management. "We were pretty good in risk products," says Hassell. "Now we think we're incomparable." Tito, an engineer who founded Wilshire in 1972 to bring rocket science he developed at California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory into the investment industry, calls the alliance a milestone. "We have about 125 consulting clients," he says. "Our focus tends to be on the largest pension funds. Bank of New York can provide access to our technology to a much broader base."
