Service Provider Survey Membership

Participation in any Global Custodian survey was always free of charge, and that remains the case in 2010.

However, we are this year introducing for the first time a modest charge for servicing your needs during our survey process. Those who elect to pay the fee will not only enjoy a higher standard of service, but will also collect a range of benefits, including advertising opportunities, marketing materials, directory entries and research reports. The charges, and the various level of benefits to which they entitle the user, are set out in the table below.

The same schedule of charges and benefits will apply to every Global Custodian survey in 2010. Providers that take part in more than one survey will pay the charge once only: it is not levied per survey. Multi-survey providers, many of whom are already paying significant sums for service support, re-prints and research reports, should not expect significant changes to their prices. Discounts will remain largely the same, though minor price increases will be introduced. We are inviting all providers to commit to a particular package at the start of the first Global Custodian survey in which they participate. That commitment is not for twelve months. It will be possible to upgrade to a more expensive package in a subsequent survey.

We are conscious that introducing a charge for service will be unwelcome, and aware of the time and effort service providers invest in securing responses to our surveys. But surveys have become a major cost centre for the publication, with more than a dozen full-time equivalent employees now engaged in scripting questionnaires, collecting responses, entering data, managing databases, handling queries and preparing both research reports and re-prints across ten separate surveys. Their activities have also necessitated heavy and continuing investment in new software applications and hardware. It has become impossible to justify costs of this magnitude on the basis of the small number of institutions that purchased research or re-prints, and to maintain service levels and survey standards of the kind those institutions had every right to expect, while offering the same level of service to every provider.

All of that said, we would like to re-emphasise that participation in every Global Custodian survey remains absolutely free: the charges are being introduced only to support the servicing of providers during and after each survey. Even participants on a Standard package will continue to have access to provider pages, where details of their responses will be posted – they will simply not be able to access support from the Global Custodian surveys team until the end of the survey, when the final lists of respondents for survey calculations are prepared and agreed.