SD-03.1 — Manager Sourcing & Pipeline
Business Domain: BD-03 Manager & Fund Investment (Front office) · Applies: BOTH
Purpose
Identifies and maintains a pipeline of external managers and funds for potential allocation. Manager Sourcing & Pipeline is the front of the fund-investing chain: it turns the whole population of external managers into a managed, stage-gated pipeline of candidates worth researching. It sources both ways an institution finds managers — through its own networks and through the consultant gatekeepers — and screens for first-pass fit. It produces candidates; it does not research or select them.
Service Operations
- Maintain the manager universe — the database of external managers and funds the institution tracks, by strategy, asset class and vehicle type.
- Source managers — originate candidates through networks, conferences, placement agents, consultant pipelines and emerging-manager scanning.
- Screen for initial fit — first-pass filtering on strategy, asset class, vehicle, size and capacity against the allocation need.
- Maintain and stage-gate the pipeline — track candidates through the stages from sourced to longlisted, with the re-up calendar for existing managers.
- Commission or consume external manager research — engage an investment consultant for a manager search, or consume a consultant’s standing manager-research ratings.
Inputs and outputs
- Inputs: the allocation need from BD-01; manager databases and the consultant manager-research universe; networks, conferences and placement-agent contact.
- Outputs: a screened manager pipeline and longlist — consumed by SD-03.2 Manager Research & Selection (which researches the candidates) and by SD-03.8’s re-up calendar.
Entities
- Consumes: Legal Entity (E-01) — the external manager and GP as roles of the party master; Fund & Vehicle (PM-01).
- Owns: none — the pipeline is an analytical artefact.
Standards
- No external standard governs sourcing. The investment-consultant manager-research industry (Mercer, Cambridge Associates, Albourne, bfinance, Aon) is the de-facto external manager universe many institutions source through.
Open extensions
- Whether a Manager record — distinct from the generic Legal Entity — warrants a first-class entity. The sibling question on the direct-investment route has been answered: the BD-04 deal record is now first-class (PM-15 Deal / Investment Opportunity, owned by SD-04.1 Deal Origination & Sourcing) — a precedent for this pipeline, which remains an analytical artefact for now.
- The two consultant consumption models — the rated-universe / buy-list model and the bespoke-search / RFP model.