Client-Designed Indexes

Our client-designed indexes, leveraging more than 50 years of leadership in index design, allow investors to customize any of our equity or fixed income indexes — covering market cap, factors, thematic, sustainability, and climate — to incorporate specific client benchmark or portfolio requirements.

Target benefits
Configure indexes to meet your needs

Get flexibility across index types

Customize our equity and fixed income indexes covering market cap, factors, thematic and climate.

Adopt indexes based on rigorous methodology

Built for replicability and transparency, using same calculation and maintenance methodology as our core offerings.

Leverage decades of index experience

Benefit from same long-standing production process, infrastructure and data used for calculating all MSCI indexes.

How we can help you

Our client-designed indexes can be used to reflect asset allocation views and investment strategy constraints, as well as incorporate additional criteria related to regulation.

 

Reduce or eliminate the need to switch indexes following a shift in strategy, gaining flexibility while potentially cutting costs, reducing risk and easing administrative burdens.

Asset owners

  • Better align policy benchmark and portfolio indexes with an index designed to allow you to modify your criteria as your strategy evolves

Asset managers

  • Leverage our calculation of specialized in-house indexes
  • Incorporate capping criteria to help you assess alignment with regulatory guidelines

ETF managers and broker/dealers

  • Construct and issue index-linked products to meet specific investment strategies 
  • Apply differentiated investability and liquidity criteria

Build your client-designed index in five easy steps

We use the same construction, maintenance infrastructure and robust datasets we have used to build indexes for institutional investors for over 50 years.

1. Universe and methodology
Choose your regional/country focus and parent index methodology.

 

2. Criteria and screens
Incorporate additional criteria or screens to refine universe.

 

3. Currency and tax rates
Define your currency and hedging requirements; specify applicable tax rate on dividends and type of return calculation.

 

4. History and rebalancing
Specify length of history, rebalancing dates and buffer requirements.

 

5. Data type and delivery
Choose data type — such as index level, constituent level or both — and delivery format.

Related to client-designed indexes

Direct indexing

Equipping wealth and asset managers with ability to deliver personalized indexes and portfolios at scale.

Index methodology

Take a deeper dive into our thinking behind our vast offering of indexes.