In 2024, Equilar launched ERIC (the Equilar Research Intelligence Copilot) inside Equilar Insight. It lets subscribers query three years of proxy, 10-K, and 8-K disclosures alongside ISS, Glass Lewis, and major institutional investor voting guidelines, filtering results by peer group, industry, and financials with source citations.
Because most executive compensation consulting firms already subscribe to Equilar, partners naturally ask us where Spencer fits.
The difference is not the underlying filings. Both products read the same public DEF 14As, 10-Ks, and 8-Ks. The difference is which chair at the committee table each product was built for, and where the work stops.
The corporate seat vs. the advisory seat
Equilar’s core programs, CHRO Navigator and Exec Comp Navigator, are built first for in-house compensation and governance teams across Corporate America. When an internal compensation team uses ERIC, they are typically researching policy questions for their own board: What are the stock holding requirements in our peers’ ownership guidelines? Do peers provide excise tax gross-ups upon a change in control? What events trigger recoupment under peer clawback policies?
For an in-house team, a cited text summary answering that policy question is often the finish line. The output stays inside the company.
An advisory firm’s work looks very different. A 15-person consulting firm might advise forty public compensation committees across a single proxy season. Every engagement ends with an exhibit package and a committee deck carrying the firm’s name.
For a partner, a disclosure search result is not the deliverable. As Equilar notes on ERIC’s product page, ERIC is built for disclosure Q&A and does not calculate derived numbers. In an advisory firm, derived numbers and normalized tables are the work: combining retainer and per-meeting fee structures, calculating total direct compensation across cash and equity, cutting percentiles at 25/50/75 or 10/25/50/75/90, isolating Non-Executive Chair and Lead Independent Director premiums with prevalence math, and reconciling footnotes when peers report on different fiscal years.
ERIC is built for disclosure search and policy Q&A. Spencer is built for the consulting firm producing normalized, multi-peer Excel studies across forty clients.
How advisory firms use both
Most firms we speak with keep their Equilar subscription and use Spencer alongside it. They solve different parts of the workflow.
Equilar Insight and ERIC act as a structured database and policy research desk. When you want to check ISS or Glass Lewis voting guidelines or run a quick keyword screen across the market, ERIC is built for that.
Spencer is where the client study gets assembled. You give Spencer a peer group, and it reads the primary SEC filings from EDGAR, extracts and normalizes the compensation and governance tables, runs the summary statistics and percentile math, and exports a formatted Excel workbook with every cell linked to its source disclosure.
Equilar / ERIC is the disclosure search engine and voting-guideline research desk inside Equilar Insight.
Spencer turns raw SEC filings into calculated, multi-peer Excel exhibits built to your firm’s conventions.
What happens when clients have AI in the boardroom?
There is a second question that comes up in nearly every partner conversation: when corporate teams have tools like ERIC in-house, how does that change what they expect from an outside consultant?
Committees did not hire compensation consultants because management lacked access to SEC.gov, and they will not stop hiring consultants because management has a copilot over proxy disclosures. Boards hire an independent advisor for judgment: knowing what the committee will stomach, whether a proposed peer group is defensible or aspirational, and how to structure an incentive plan that survives shareholder scrutiny.
What does change is tolerance for slow turnaround on routine exhibit work. When a Committee Chair asks what happens to the peer median if you drop three companies and add two, taking four days to rebuild the workbook is harder to defend when everyone in the room knows the filings are public.
What advisory-grade software requires
Building for the advisor’s side of the table forces three product choices that a disclosure search tool does not have to make:
1. Every cell in the workbook must open to the filing
A partner signs their name to every exhibit that goes to a compensation committee. If checking a generated table takes as long as building it by hand, the software saves zero senior time. In Spencer, every cell links directly to the verbatim excerpt and filing date in the DEF 14A, 10-K, or 8-K, turning an evening of review into five minutes of spot-checking.
2. Silent disclosures stay blank
The fastest way to lose a board’s trust is presenting an inferred figure as disclosed fact. When a proxy does not disclose a number, Spencer marks the cell Not disclosed rather than guessing or interpolating.
3. The output is a versioned Excel exhibit, not a chat thread
Advisory work is iterative. Peers get swapped after the first draft, committee fee structures get split out, and custom columns get added the afternoon before a meeting. Spencer produces versioned .xlsx deliverables and retains your firm’s saved peer groups and percentile conventions from one proxy season to the next.