The Northern Trust Company has launched Fund Peek Through, the enhancement to the Northern Trust Passport reporting package, which allows plan sponsors and other institutional investors to “drill down” into mutual funds and view detailed asset information on all the holdings of the fund. The expanded security data can be integrated with individually managed plan assets, providing institutional investors with an unprecedented level of detail on total plan risk exposure.
Through Northern Trust Passport, plan sponsors and institutions have direct access to underlying fund holdings information, including fundamental risk characteristics such as industry/sector, country, and currency. Armed with comprehensive plan/investment portfolio asset information, plan sponsors and institutions can better evaluate their exposure and be well positioned to make more informed decisions. For plans with both mutual funds and actively managed assets Fund Peek Through operates as a critical risk management tool, providing you with the ability to quantify total combined exposure to a particular security, industry or geographic region.
Northern Trust has partnered with Thomson Financial/Vestek, a company specializing in data collection and analysis, to gather underlying asset information from fund companies and create a central repository for Fund Peek Through. As a valued resource of the financial services industry for almost 20 years, Vestek maintains the highest levels of data security, integrity and confidentiality.
“Corporate and Institutional clients need to know and understand the details that make up total plan and investment portfolio risk exposure,” reports Brian Huckstep, second vice president of Product Development at Northern Trust. “Without access to the underlying asset information from fund companies, plan sponsors and other institutional investors do not have the compete picture of what their exposure might be to a particular industry or stock across their total plan. Fund Peek Through seamlessly integrates total plan data, allowing clients to analyze and act accordingly.”
“This is a mutually beneficial partnership,” states Keith Webster, managing director of Vestek Select. “It allows Vestek to leverage our longstanding relationships with fund companies to quickly and efficiently provide Northern with timely and informative data. In turn, Northern will integrate the data across the total plan or investment portfolio to assist clients in analyzing their investments more precisely.”