Wilshire Sells Off Indexes Business

Wilshire Associates Inc., which operated Wilshire Indexes, one of the earliest attempts to measure the entire U.S. stock market, has begun selling off key parts of the Wilshire Indexes benchmark business—the latest sign of the difficulty smaller index providers have competing in a market dominated by a few financial giants. 

A March 2 press release confirmed that VettaFi LLC, a subsidiary of the TMX Group, acquired Wilshire’s Global Listed Infrastructure Organization family of indexes, which will be rebranded to the GLIO VettaFi Global Listed Infrastructure Index and GLIO VettaFi Global Real Assets Index. 

Meanwhile, Wilshire Advisors LLC, a separate Wilshire company, purchased select assets from Wilshire Indexes, including flagship offerings such as the Wilshire 5000 Index Series, Wilshire Global Minimum Variance Index Series, Wilshire Style Index Series, Wilshire Real Estate Index Series and Wilshire Liquid Alternatives Index Series, a company spokesperson confirmed.

Separately, ISS STOXX, which owns PLANSPONSOR, acquired from Wilshire Indexes the W+ platform, a tool enabling institutional investors, asset managers and financial intermediaries to design and tailor custom indexes.

The moves have resulted in a wave of layoffs for Wilshire employees who worked on the indexes, according to LinkedIn posts from former employees. 

Wilshire OpCo UK Ltd. and Wilshire Benchmarks Topco Ltd.—which make up the firm’s U.K. indexing arm—entered administration, the U.K. process governing business insolvency, with administrators from FRP Advisory appointed over subsidiary companies.

“Wilshire OpCo operated established and respected index solutions that are embedded in institutional workflows,” said Chad Griffin, a partner in FRP Advisory and the administrator charged with winding down Wilshire OpCo UK Ltd.’s business, in a statement. “We are pleased to have helped secure the successful sales of the company’s key assets so that the future of these index solutions [has] been secured, minimizing client disruption.” 

Trouble for Chasing Competing Benchmarks

Wilshire Indexes was spun out from Wilshire Advisors in 2023 with ambitions of competing with established benchmark providers. The demise of the business highlights a central reality of modern investing: The market for financial benchmarks—the indexes that underpin trillions of dollars in mutual funds, exchange-traded funds and institutional portfolios—is controlled by a small group of firms whose products have become deeply embedded in the financial system. 

For decades, those benchmarks have been dominated by providers such as MSCI, FTSE Russell, and S&P Dow Jones Indices. Their indexes collectively track tens of trillions of dollars in assets, making them essential reference points for asset managers and institutional investors around the world. 

Wilshire’s retreat is striking partly because of its history. In 1974, the firm created the Wilshire 5000, one of the first attempts to track the entire U.S. equity market, rather than a smaller sample of companies. The index was designed to capture nearly every publicly traded American stock at a time when benchmarks such as the Dow Jones Industrial Average and the S&P 500 were far less dominant. 

The Wilshire 5000 later became an important reference point for the early era of passive investing. In the 1990s, Vanguard selected the index as the benchmark for its Total Stock Market Index Fund, which eventually grew into one of the largest investment funds in the world. 

Yet the firm gradually lost ground as other index providers expanded their offerings and gained wider adoption. Vanguard ultimately moved away from the Wilshire benchmark in favor of competing indexes, and over time, investors and asset managers increasingly gravitated toward the larger providers’ products.