As a manager of emerging managers, FIS Group's investment process delivers competative risk-adjusted returns and provides institutional funding opportunities and assistance to talented emerging managers. This is achieved through aggressive manager sourcing, analysis of the manager's investment process, operational infrastructure, and organizational dynamics in order to evaluate the likelihood of future performance success, value-added fund construction and comprehensive risk control tools and procedures.

FIS Group skillfully constructs customized domestic and global portfolios using emerging managers. Manager allocations vary by size, style, and capitalization through the use of proprietary fund construction models, algorithms and state of the art systems that are designed to extract the maximum amount of alpha from the managers while observing client risk constraints.

Emerging managers are broadly defined as investment firms with an investment track recored of less than five years and less than $2 billion in assets under management. This basic definition may vary with each plan sponsor, but certainly varies the investment product at hand. Our research has shown that there is an alpha advantage in employing the use of highly skilled emerging managers. The argument is not merely that emerging managers are better simply owing to their size, but instead that the existence of the following factors in highly skilled emerging manager firms have contributed to their alpha advantage when compared to larger firms :

Portfolio Structure:

• Investment insight amplified through more concentrated portfolios
• “Best ideas” less diluted
• Trade more nimbly with negligible market impact

Organizational Dynamics:

• Personal compensation more directly tied to alpha production; whereas managers at established firms have greater “safety net” from baseline fee income from large asset pools and the firm’s franchise value
• Passion for success and focus unencumbered by bureaucracy and “Committee think”