With the rebranding of Marsh McLennan to Marsh officially in effect, Mercer is leveraging the global consolidation of its parent company to expand its own offerings, starting with a new comparative benchmarking tool for private market funds.

The investment giant recently developed a new platform with S&P Global and Cambridge Associates to deliver comprehensive private markets performance analytics. Launched late last year and currently in beta, the platform leverages GP and LP data to provide performance benchmarks, bringing much needed transparency as investor capital continues to flood the space.

The service will offer aggregated, anonymized insights, including global fund performance monitoring, fundraising tracking, and deal analytics. It’s being developed to address the industry’s long-standing challenge of fragmented and inconsistent private market data.

The rapid expansion of private markets is creating a surge of new opportunities for investors (including Mercer). It’s also created a level of uncertainty and complexity that many asset owners struggle to manage — even the largest ones. Nearly half of Mercer’s largest institutional clients increased their allocations to private markets last year, with even more planning to make increases this year.

As product offerings increase, Michael Dempsey, president of Mercer’s wealth business, argues it “is critically important the industry delivers quality and not just quantity.”

“Private markets growth is vital, but we've seen a lot of product proliferation,” he added.

 

Growth Across All Segments

The new private markets analytics platform comes as all four businesses that were under Marsh McLennan — Mercer, Marsh, Guy Carpenter, and Oliver Wyman — will now operate under a unified global brand of Marsh. Mercer will fully adopt the Marsh name in 2027.

Dempsey spoke with Institutional Investor at the New York Stock Exchange on January 14, where senior leaders from Marsh rang the closing bell to celebrate the rebrand. He explained that Mercer’s business is expanding rapidly as the lines between institutional and retail investing continue to blur and assets become increasingly complex.

“We now have our highest and fastest rate of growth coming through wealth managers, working with insurers, working with family offices,” said Dempsey, adding that growth also is coming from the defined benefit and defined contribution markets globally.

The rebrand will allow Mercer to provide greater specialization with greater scale to its global clients “in a much more integrated and unified way,” adding: “It gives us a range of capabilities across risk strategy, people, and investments.”

 

Even the Larger Players Need Help


OCIO — once typically reserved for the midmarket — is drawing interest from even large asset owners. “Now we're seeing the largest and most sophisticated clients look at outsourcing because of complexity,” Dempsey said.

Amid this complexity, Mercer is advancing a total portfolio approach, which is designed to help asset owners make decisions across the entire enterprise rather than within siloed asset classes.

Megatrends like AI and energy transition are making TPA critical to “assess the new world that we operate in today.” For example, if an investor wanted to reduce their exposure to AI, they couldn’t simply reduce their exposure to big tech.

“You're not reducing exposure to AI. AI is penetrating across all industries and segments,” Dempsey explained. “It's moving into private credit. It's moving into real assets. So how can you assess the new world that we operate in today and make sure that you're bringing governance and risk management into that?” That’s where TPA comes in.

In an increasingly overcrowded market, asset owners and individual clients need help separating the wheat from the chaff. “We want to ensure that we see product differentiation and value.” He added that while the of private market products is great for innovation, it’s only valuable when quality can rise to the top.

Confusion and uncertainty aside, Mercer sees outsized return opportunities within private credit for infrastructure and real assets in the middle market, as well as in secondaries and co-investments within private equity.

“We’re always looking for that quality that sometimes can get overlooked when there's new growth and everybody wants access,” Dempsey said.