Research Reports»Calastone March 2020

The application of new technology is important in helping the investment funds industry to win new business and to deliver attractive, cost-efficient solutions to investors.

Digital transformation has become a buzz phrase for the asset management industry. This implies innovation in business platforms and cloud-based services, along with control and scalability in how data is managed.

In keeping with previous surveys, we asked whether the asset management industry is good at adopting new technology (fig 2).

The next section has been included in the survey for the past three years. This evaluates which companies will be the most valuable partners to asset management firms in managing business innovation and which will be the primary point of disruption to the investment funds industry.

In this section, the survey evaluates how the distribution channels that asset managers are using to sell their fund products are evolving over time.

The primary challenge that asset management companies currently face in attracting new investors, respondents tell us, is a lack of investor education.

As the asset management industry focuses on delivering “better solutions” to the investor (rather than simply “better products”), one fundamental component in this package is how investors will meet their requirement for investment advice.

Distributed ledger technology and artificial intelligence continue to be the technology areas that survey respondents believe will have most impact on the future of the asset management industry.