Markit, a provider of financial information services, reports that the state of Wisconsin’s investment board (SWIB) has selected Markit’s enterprise data management (EDM) platform as a “central hub for all of its investment data and reconciliations.”
SWIB, created in 1951, is the ninth largest US public pension fund and the 28th largest public or private pension fund in the world, officials say. It manages $104 billion worth of investments, according to Markit. SWIB includes the assets of the Wisconsin retirement system (WRS) and six other funds, Markit says, and the WRS provides benefits to more than 592,000 current or former employees of state agencies, the state university system, school districts and most local governments.
“The Core Fund, the larger of the two WRS trust funds with diversified holdings in global stocks, bonds, loans, real estate and private equity, ended the year with a preliminary return of 5.7 percent,” according to a recent SWIB statement. “The Core Fund’s preliminary five-year return is 9.3 percent. The preliminary market value of the Core Fund on December 31, 2014, was $88.7 billion. The Variable Fund, an optional stock fund targeting 70 percent domestic and 30 percent international equities, ended the year with a preliminary return of 7.3 percent. The Variable Fund’s preliminary market value was $7.3 billion on December 31, 2014.”
SWIB needed a solution to manage “the immense amount of data that we need as a global investment management organization,” Lori Wersal, SWIB’s chief financial officer, says in the Markit statement. The Markit platform will allow SWIB to reduce the time for data requests and “provide higher quality and readily available data for modelling, analysis and investment decisions,” Wersal says.
“SWIB is one of the most progressive state pension funds actively investing in non-traditional asset classes,” Spiros Giannaros, managing director and global head of enterprise data management at Markit, says in the vendor’s statement.
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