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David Quirk
David Quirk, managing consultant, Citisoft
Quirk heads the firm's separately managed accounts practice, which has followed the industry through a multitude of changes over the last few years. Quirk spoke to Operations Management about some of the changes and what sponsors and managers can do to be prepared.
Operations Management: Can you talk a little bit about what is happening now in the SMA marketplace?
David Quirk: The SMA market has been in a period of transition over the last few years. Traditionally, it has been an investment manager-focused marketplace, with each investment manager having fiduciary responsibility and operations and technology responsibility for managed accounts. It is shifting to a marketplace where the plan sponsors are starting to take on more of the operations and technology responsibilities and looking to investment managers for their core competencies.
This trend came in with multi-strategy portfolios, which are accounts where you have multiple manager strategies. Now we have the [unified managed account], which is hot in the marketplace. The UMA is a managed account like a multi-strategy portfolio holding equities and fixed income, but also ETFs, mutual funds, and derivatives. Next on the horizon is the UMH, where multiple accounts for multiple members of one household...