The global asset management industry is experiencing fundamental shifts that will shape its future. Industry revenues are slowing, operating margins are increasingly under pressure and divergence between winners and losers means that consolidation is inevitable. Only the strongest will survive.
Fund administrators are adapting to an age of digital transformation, investing to meet the needs of their asset management clients and the investors they serve.
Survey results indicate that the drive to promote digital transformation (fig 2) is at the forefront of respondents’ priorities.
Digital transformation will play an important part in shaping the future direction and success of the asset management industry.
Although the asset management industry remains highly competitive, it is important that firms cooperate with each other across the value chain to ensure consistent use of standards (messaging standards, trade matching standards, standards around corporate actions processing, collateral management and many other areas) to encourage process harmonisation and minimise ad hoc ways of working.
In this final section of the survey, we asked survey constituents to predict which types of technology will be most important to their business in three years’ time (fig 14). This generated a wide variety of responses, with no single technology element clearly dominant.
