2020: Bigger Team, Bigger Play

2019 was a challenging year for the financial industry. For majority of the year, the Asian markets were clouded by unfavorable headlines, from global trade tensions to slowing growth in China and political unrest in Hong Kong. The MSCI Asia ex-Japan index nonetheless closed at a year high and rose 15%, ending on an optimistic note with China and the U.S. reaching a first-phase trade deal.

For Morningstar in Asia, I am proud of the significant expansion and solid growth we have achieved during the year. The key to our success is rooted in our commitment to empowering investor success, from the past 35 years to beyond. It’s our mission to help investors navigate market cycles by cutting through the noise and finding long-term value.

We have continued to broaden our suite of services and offerings to make them more relevant and useful to you, whether you are a retail, professional or institutional investor, and whether you are investing in stocks, mutual funds, ETFs, pensions, or even in private investments.

Bigger Team

Our bigger pool of great talent enables us to better serve our clients and continue earning their trust.

To start, we strategically expanded our product management and research teams in our key regional hubs: Hong Kong and Singapore.

In July 2019, Morningstar reached an agreement with BNP Paribas to provide our Equity Research for the investment bank’s buy-side clients in Asia Pacific. It is a vote of confidence for our independent research. At the same time, we significantly expanded our equity research team to grow our coverage on Asian companies.

In order to provide better and more timely services to our clients, we also invested a great deal in growing our client service team. We welcomed our first Asia-based colleague from Pitchbook, the Seattle-based private data and research company acquired by Morningstar in 2016, to dedicate more effort in the region. Amid the public and private market convergence trend, Morningstar strives to provide a seamless experience for investors to capitalize on both markets.

Broader Reach

We continue to make our research and tools easier for investors to understand, more relevant to key decisions they make, and more effective in helping improve the outcomes they can achieve.

To that front, in October 2019, we enhanced our forward-looking Morningstar Analyst Rating and Morningstar Quantitative Rating by setting a higher bar for active funds, and placing a greater focus on fees. The Morningstar Analyst Rating denotes our analysts’ conviction in a fund’s ability to outperform based on their qualitative analysis, while the Quantitative Rating is a companion system that uses machine-learning techniques to assign ratings to funds not covered by our analysts.

For those who are new to Morningstar, stay tuned for our brand-new Asia websites, equipped with more information, features and handy tools for investors to better understand, manage, and monitor investments (you can get a taste from our U.S. website). Not only are we setting to enrich our content to better engage with our audience, but we are also expanding coverage on our websites to include markets and stocks on top of mutual funds, ETFs and pension funds.

Better Placed

For our more sophisticated users in the asset and wealth management communities, we will roll out in 2020 Morningstar Direct Web, our flagship investment analysis platform. This cloud platform will provide easier, faster and more secure ways to access Morningstar research, data and analytics, and will be equipped with exclusive new functions such as Mercer’s comprehensive data and qualitative strategy research, and tailored versions to suit the needs of different users.

In the midst of rising concerns about fund liquidity, growing scrutiny in ESG strategies, and heightening regulations to raise fee transparency and promote accountability, Morningstar is well-positioned to help the industry navigate Asia’s evolving regulatory landscape: our comprehensive Governance Solution helps wealth managers guide fund recommendations, and improve investment and product due diligence frameworks.

We advocate for greater transparency and lower costs to improve outcomes for investors, and we have taken action with the launch of the Morningstar Open Indexes Project – a disruptive idea of offering our equity indexes for benchmarking purposes for free. All Morningstar indexes, spanning across equity, fixed income, alternative, multi-asset and ESG universes, originate from Morningstar’s independent research ecosystem and are based on transparent, rules-based methodologies you can trust.

Last but not least, I’m very honored to be awarded Executive of the Year for Financial Services at the HKB Management Excellence Awards 2019. It’s a great recognition of our strategy and steadfastness in Asia. Hats off to my team for their huge effort in making all this happen!

By laying a strong foundation in 2019, we are well equipped to help investors and strive for the long-term growth of Morningstar in the region for years to come. I hope you are as excited as we are and I wish you all a prosperous 2020.