Frontier Investment Consulting is overhauling its business structure to move away from a predominantly advisory-focused firm to a triptych structure that will include investment advice, strategic advice or business modelling and online research products.

The company is currently developing a proprietary database of fund characteristics, named Prism, to help funds make strategic decisions, while it is also building an online database of all the firm's research products, which will be named Mercury.

To reflect the broader business structure, the firm will also rebrand to Frontier Advisors later this year.

"The reason the business is changed is because the client base is changing quite dramatically," Frontier chief executive Damian Moloney told Investor Weekly.

"It is obviously getting bigger, more in-house staff, and covering a lot more territory in terms of products, compliance and [projects].

"Previously, we were a business that focused on the investment portfolio and now we are saying that we can help you with your business as well."

The firm likes to think of its new online database, Mercury, as the iTunes of the investment world, where portfolio managers can download research products as required.

Moloney said it reflected the firm's new approach to distributing its products in anticipation of changes in the wider industry, as consolidation had created larger funds with growing in-house teams.

These teams are likely to want more selective services from a number of asset consultants, rather than committing to just one firm.

"What we have done is put most of our research online and clients will be able to buy the research as a separate service. So they don't actually sit down and get direct advice; they get the research piece itself," Moloney said.

"That is the disaggregation of our services."

Most of Frontier's clients were still on full retainer, but the first signs that the industry was changing had become visible, he said.

"Some [clients] are starting to select pieces of the retainer and some are starting to use us and someone else. That is just something that is going to happen," he said.

"As the teams get bigger, they want more and more tools, [but] do they want more advice? We are not sure, so we say: 'You can have the advice or the tools.'

"It will be interesting to see what the funds will do, especially with manager research. You can do it yourself, but why would you if you can buy it off the shelf content and do your own analysis and enhancements to that?"

The online database will include research on 1467 managers and 1600 products, and will be launched at the end of this year.

Moloney said the new strategy was also a reflection of the increasing complexity of the super industry, as funds were starting to look at retirement products.

"We spend a lot of time talking about retirement. [This] is not really investment advice; it is product advice and product structuring," he said.

"It is not just about tax, but also about incoming capital and stage of life, or life cycle and the investment configuration issues around that.

"Most big funds these days are in sector configurations with lots of different managers, mostly on a pre-tax basis. But can your investment portfolio actually support it?

"It is quite a complicated area. A lot of people come up with solutions that fit their business to sell to funds, but the funds themselves have a different set of needs."

The firm was working with several clients on developing a strategy, but there was no one-size-fits-all solution, he said.

"At the end of the day, you need to sit down and look at your members, and need to know a little bit more about their cohorts, their age and income requirements, even a little bit about their tax and social security benefits. So fit products to the membership, rather than take products off the shelf," he said.

He said he expected more consolidation of super funds, although there was a limit to the number of voluntary mergers.

"The last decade, they have been friendly mergers - funds that have been run well anyway, they have merged for scale or because their industries overlap," he said.

"But the next four or five years, you will have funds that are just not performing.

"It is going to be hard to justify merging with a fund that is not performing for the fund that is performing.

"How is that in the interest of the members that it is taking over?"