Director of Research, Executive Vice President,
Strategic Insight, an Asset International company

Twenty four years ago, Avi co-founded Strategic Insight, an investment management industry think-tank and data resource. Today, SI’s research and technologies are shared throughout the world with mutual fund management companies overseeing over $15 trillion, including 90% of the U.S. fund industry asset, about 90% of the largest U.S. insurance companies serving the variable annuity industry, the S.E.C., and the Investment Company Institute, among others. Globally, Strategic Insight research and consulting services are provided to over 70 of the most dynamic investment managers and distributors benefiting from expanding demand for wealth management in Asia, Europe, and Australia.

Avi contributes to SI research, which spans how the mutual fund industry is adapting to the changed environment; product innovations; fact-based studies helping in mapping growth opportunities; income-at-retirement and variable annuity trends; independent trustees’ education and 15(c) analytics; peer analysis; and fee and profitability benchmarking. Avi also consults with SI’s clients, which, besides investment managers and fund distributors, include capital market, consulting, law, audit, back-office, hedge fund firms, and U.S. governmental agencies.

Avi participates in the on-going development of Strategic Insight Simfund databases, a competitive and business intelligence tool for mutual fund data worldwide. Simfund integrates SI proprietary research with that of Morningstar Inc. and Lipper Inc., as well as with ICI’s and SEC’s reported data and other sources, tracking monthly over $20 trillion of mutual fund assets and flow trends among such funds sold around the world.

As a passionate industry observer and strategist, Avi is widely quoted in the media and is often a panelist or a keynote speaker in investment management industry events. For example, at the June 2007 SEC hearings on the need to update, and possibly repeal, Rule 12b-1, Avi suggested that radical changes to Rule 12b-1 would be harmful to small investors. (Avi’s August 2010 webcast presentation on Rule 12b-2 was attended by executives from over 100 fund managers and distributors as well as the SEC). At the meeting of Canadian regulators with the leading investment managers in Canada in late 2007, Avi provided a US and global perspective on mutual fund innovations and investor preferences. Avi also participated in a number of fund directors’ conferences sponsored by the Independent Directors Council (IDC) and the Mutual Fund Directors Forum (MFDF).

Avi was raised in a farming village in Israel, studied Chemistry at Tel Aviv University, and received an MBA, with distinction, from New York University’s Stern School of Business in 1985. Avi lives with his wife and three children in New York City.