Global Liquidity Solutions – Money Market Team

Jeff Weaver: Our Global Liquidity Solutions team has been providing highly customized solutions for the last 30 years. We have a stable, experienced team. On average, our senior portfolio managers have 30 years in the business and 18 years at the firm. This is particularly relevant when you enter into volatile times. We always revert back to our main objectives, that being preservation of principle, maintenance of liquidity, and then providing a competitive rate of return. It's also important that we are supported by a large global credit research team. They do fantastic fundamental credit research and provide relative value assessments that are really key to our security selection. We're also supported by a strong Investment Analytics team that provides us with data and information on what's driving returns and how to best manage risk. Also supporting us is a Liquidity Client Group that helps serve our clients. Our team employs very much a consultative approach. We want to be an extension of our clients' staff. We work closely with our clients to understand what their needs are, understand what their objectives are, understand their risk tolerance. One of the keys to that is to listen, listen to what they're looking for. One of the qualities that we do like to emphasize when we're speaking with our clients is we like to use layman's terms. Many of our clients are CFOs. They are treasurers. They are people in those departments. They're really good at what they do. What they may not be as familiar with, though, is fixed income markets, bond portfolios. And that's where we come in to help with them. While our portfolios are very skewed towards generating income, particularly from the corporate sector, we'll also take advantage of other sectors and are nimble around taking advantage of sectors, such as asset-backed securities or municipal securities. We feel like those additional sectors are certainly strengths of our firm. A number of years ago, I met with a long time client and they had communicated to us that they wanted to ensure that they did not have a quarterly return that was a negative return. So we spoke with one wonder what they would need to do in order to adjust their portfolio to avoid those negative returns. And we came to the conclusion that they needed to be shorter in duration. So we implemented that strategy. We explained what they'd be giving up in order to do that. But at the same time, it was to achieve that objective of no negative returns. We've recently come through a period where interest rates rose dramatically. Negative returns were the norm and I was happy to see that they had achieved their objective of not having those negative returns.