The data was always there. It was just never usable.
A story for people who love data and hate that this trove is locked away.
The best dataset in municipal finance is one almost nobody can use.
Every public pension fund in America publishes everything. Assets, liabilities, assumptions, contributions, investment returns audited, detailed, and free. Thousands of plans, decades of history, all of it public.
And almost none of it is usable. It lives in PDFs. Hundreds of pages each. Different formats, different terms, different fiscal years. To compare two plans you open two documents and start typing into a spreadsheet. To track a hundred, you don't, you give up.
It's a treasure trove with the lid welded shut.
It doesn't have to be this way.
The information isn't the problem. The information is excellent. The problem is that nobody has ever done the unglamorous work of turning it into something you can query, compare, and trust at scale.
So that's what we do. We read the filings, every plan, every year, and turn them into structured, comparable data. Funded ratios you can rank. Trends you can chart. Assumptions you can stress. A hundred plans you can monitor at once instead of one you can barely keep up with.
Same public data. Finally usable.
We're the kind of people who get excited about a clean dataset.
Public data should be public in practice, not just in theory.
A filing nobody can read might as well be sealed. Access is the difference between transparency and the appearance of it.
A number you can't trace is a number you can't trust.
Every figure we publish links back to the exact page it came from. No black boxes. If we can't show you the source, we don't show you the number.
The boring work is the valuable work.
Reading thousands of pages and getting every figure right isn't glamorous. It's also exactly why this hasn't been done. We're fine with that.
The numbers behind the numbers.
↑ That last number is the one we exist to change.
Why I'm building this.
I started Vested because I kept running into the same wall: the pension data I wanted was right there, public and detailed, and completely impractical to actually use. Every answer meant another afternoon lost in PDFs.
It struck me that this wasn't a hard problem so much as an unglamorous one. Nobody had wanted to do the patient work of reading every filing and structuring it properly. So I started doing it, one plan at a time, every number tied back to its source.
Vested is that work, turned into a tool. If you've ever rebuilt the same pension spreadsheet for the third time, it's built for you.
Come see what's been hiding in plain sight.
The data was always there. Now it's usable. Open a plan, follow a number to its source, and see how much faster the work gets.