Tim Hodgson, head of research at Thinking Ahead Institute, has left the prolific research network which he co-founded as it seeks closer tie-in with parent group WTW. But head of TAI Marisa Hall rejected suggestions of any fundamental restructuring or the move being a cost-cutting exercise.  

Hodgson departed after almost three decades of spearheading the research effort at TAI, which was first a WTW internal initiative and then turned into an official offshoot in 2014. It has 38 asset owner members including the Future Fund, TCorp and Australian Retirement Trust, as well as 15 asset managers.  

A source told Investment Magazine that future research efforts at TAI will be spread across more of its colleagues at the Nasdaq and NYSE-listed WTW, instead of being conducted by the organisation at arm’s length in the current set-up.   

WTW contributes to more than half of TAI’s operating budget and the rest is from paying members.  

Hall, who is also a senior director at WTW, said the integration is a result of TAI undertaking more localised projects with asset owners, particularly in Australia, the Middle East and North America, which requires it to draw on resources from the broader WTW business.  

It is understood that there won’t be further departures in the TAI team apart from Hodgson. Roger Urwin, who is the other co-founder of TAI, will stay on with the business and has spent more than three decades with WTW.  

“Effectively, it’s a bit of a hub-and-spoke model where you still have the core Thinking Ahead team, but due to the sheer number of requests that we’re getting… you’ll find that Thinking Ahead is probably just increasing its integration with [WTW] colleagues,” she said.   

“Tim, who we love dearly and still are in contact with, through agreement with the broader business has left WTW as a whole… I think that’s probably a very natural evolution of a relationship with a longtime colleague.”  

Hodgson declined to comment when contacted.   

TAI is one of the earliest proponents of the total portfolio approach (TPA) and has produced application frameworks and TPA case studies among allocators, which helped promote the complex portfolio construction method to allocators.  

The TPA studies bolster WTW’s investment advisory offering, of which the transition from a strategic asset allocation (SAA) method to TPA is a critical part. A 2024 study from TAI found that organisations which adopted TPA added 1.8 per cent alpha per annum over their SAA peers across a 10-year period.  

Hall said TPA has become a “firehose conversation” due to the wide interest from asset owners looking to understand and adopt the approach. She said this is another reason why TAI needs help from its WTW colleagues to fulfil member requests.  

“It’s moved from the work that we’ve done in the total portfolio approach, starting 20 years ago with the asset owner peer studies done with TCorp and the Future Fund to now. We would say that we’re having triple the number of conversations on TPA. Because of that, we’re doing a lot more specialist projects,” she said.  

Hall denied any cost-cutting motives behind TAI’s integration and that members shouldn’t expect any changes in the way they interact with the organisation.   

“We’re trying to make more use of the broader resources we have at our disposal based on what clients and members are asking us for,” she said.   

TAI’s other areas of research include sustainability, wealth and governance, as well as asset and organisation-centric papers such as the annual global pension asset study focusing on the biggest pension funds and the global DC peer study outlining different organisation designs.   

TAI currently has a team of nine led by Hall.