When Paul Riccardella, Head of Americas Wealth Indexed Investments Coverage at MSCI Wealth, sits down with advisors, the conversation often starts with a recognition of how fundamentally client expectations have shifted. Every buying experience consumers encounter now arrives tailored to individual preferences—from streaming recommendations to retail purchases. Investment portfolios represent one of the last holdouts, but Riccardella sees the industry rapidly closing the gap.
“Almost every buying experience they have now is personalized in some way, shape, or form,” Riccardella says. “And investment is simply catching up to that reality.”
For wealth management firms, catching up means mastering a difficult balance—delivering truly customized portfolios without sacrificing efficiency or consistency across the firm. That’s where MSCI comes in. With more than 50 years of institutional indexing experience, the firm now applies its data, analytics, and portfolio management expertise to help advisors make personalization scalable and practical.
MSCI’s Established Footprint
MSCI’s reach across wealth management extends far beyond what many advisors might realize. Approximately $1.8 trillion in wealth management client portfolio AUM links directly to MSCI indexes, and more than $155 billion sits in directly indexed separately managed accounts, as of January 2026. Beyond serving as an index provider, Riccardella notes, MSCI functions as a comprehensive “tools provider to wealth managers.”
“We are relevant to wealth in a number of ways,” Riccardella points out. “Whether it’s data, content, analytics, different tools to bring efficiency to the investment process and bring them personalization at scale.”
The firm calculates more than 246,000 indexes daily, supporting an infrastructure built to handle customization at institutional scale. Once known primarily for institutional benchmarks such as the MSCI ACWI (All Country World Index)—the standard for global equity performance—the firm has turned attention toward empowering advisors to build portfolios that reflect client values, tax situations, and investment preferences.
Personalization Through Data and Screening
Clients increasingly want portfolios that align with their values or exclude certain exposures. Riccardella identifies sector classification, sustainability scores, business involvement screens, factor exposures, and thematic scores as elements individual investors want their advisors to incorporate in portfolio construction.
“It’s an important form of personalization,” he says of tilts and screening capabilities. MSCI produces data through its participation in the Global Industry Classification Standard (GICS®) sector hierarchy (in conjunction with S&P) and through proprietary sustainability and climate research backed by hundreds of global analysts. The goal: to make personalization a practical capability not just a marketing buzzword.
Investment processes are changing and becoming more automated, Riccardella observes, and many tools MSCI provides allow for screening, tilting, overweighting, or avoiding certain stocks or types of securities. The firm’s analytical platforms and rebalancing capabilities enable end clients to remain anchored to a policy portfolio while implementing some level of personalization at the account level. Advisors can create top-level policy and allocation or outsource portfolio construction, then use MSCI tools and personalization data to align with a chosen policy while maintaining slightly different holdings at the account level.
The result offers a middle ground between rigid uniformity and potentially chaotic individualization—portfolios remain true to a firm’s philosophy while giving clients the customization they expect.
Tax Alpha as a Foundational Value Proposition
While personalization caters to preferences, tax optimization can deliver tangible, lasting value. “I can’t overemphasize how much taxes really matter because tax alpha is such a consistent form of outperformance for end clients,” says Riccardella, noting the unique position tax efficiency holds in an advisor’s toolkit.
Tax optimization can yield measurable benefits for years—sometimes a decade or more—making it one of the most reliable ways for advisors to demonstrate value regardless of market conditions. Unlike market returns, which remain beyond anyone’s control, tax efficiency represents an area where advisors can actively add value through strategic implementation.
MSCI’s tax optimization tools aim to balance tax efficiency with tracking error, offering algorithms designed to minimize short-term tax exposures while keeping portfolios aligned with underlying indexes. The firm’s rebalancing features seek to assess the impact of portfolio changes on client goals while optimizing for taxes and transaction costs.
As tax awareness grows across the industry, Riccardella believes a thoughtful tax-optimization strategy will soon become table stakes for advisors. Delivering consistent tax alpha has potential to create a tangible, repeatable value proposition independent of market performance—something advisors can point to year after year. “That’s really important for clients. And frankly, it’s important for advisors because it helps support the advice that they are giving ultimately to the end client,” he explains.
Efficiency as the Key to Adoption
New technology often promises transformation but adds complexity instead. What advisors especially value about MSCI’s approach, Riccardella says, is its focus on simplifying operations to create capacity for growth.
“Using data and sophisticated analytics to bring about efficiency to an investment process really seems to excite advisors,” he says, “because with every other trend that we’ve seen in wealth management over the last decade, giving advisors more time to prospect clients and scale their businesses is really what’s important.”
MSCI positions itself as a significant partner in creating capacity for growth. The firm’s tools, including the MSCI Wealth Manager platform, seek to streamline client portfolio management for investment teams and the financial advisors they support. The platform aims to enable firms to deliver personalized portfolios at scale while facilitating efficient portfolio design, monitoring, and investment proposal generation.
Central to MSCI Wealth Manager is the proprietary MSCI Similarity Score, a factor-based methodology that looks beneath surface-level holdings to measure alignment based on risk and return characteristics at the factor level. Rather than requiring exact holding matches, the Similarity Score compares client portfolios to model portfolios or benchmarks on a behavioral level. The approach enables flexible rebalancing, supports advisor discretion, and aims to keep clients aligned with core strategies even as they pursue customization.
Advisors can monitor adherence to house views, track drift across portfolios, analyze private assets within multi-asset portfolios, and generate tailored reports—all within a single platform. MSCI’s system allows firms to distribute investment strategies directly within advisor workflows while enabling individual advisors to build client portfolios using approved models and funds.
Global Diversification Through ADRs
Beyond domestic equity personalization, MSCI has expanded capabilities for advisors seeking international exposure for clients. The MSCI EAFE Expanded ADR Index covers 70% of the market cap of the standard MSCI EAFE index, enabling creation of personalized international portfolios for U.S. investors through American depositary receipts. The approach extends direct indexing capabilities beyond U.S. markets while maintaining the operational efficiency advisors need.
For advisors looking to build globally diversified portfolios without the complexity of direct foreign security ownership, ADR-based solutions may offer a practical pathway. MSCI’s infrastructure, built on decades of international index expertise, supports the customization and tax optimization features advisors have come to expect in domestic portfolios.
A Call to Action for Advisors
Riccardella encourages advisors to explore MSCI Wealth Manager—a tool the firm takes great pride in. The platform increasingly incorporates different MSCI personalized data sets allowing for screening and customization.
More broadly, MSCI’s expanding presence in wealth management spans three dimensions: as a trusted index provider, as a data and tools partner enabling scalable personalization, and as a technology ally helping firms modernize portfolio construction and management.
For an industry navigating the tension between customization and scalability, between client demands and operational reality, MSCI offers institutional-grade infrastructure applied to modern wealth management challenges. Whether through MSCI-linked products, advanced tools, or personalization data, the firm helps wealth managers move beyond one-size-fits-all investing toward a new standard of personalized portfolios at scale.
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