The bear market in fund management is over: fund managers are no longer focused on cutting costs, but investing in platforms, people and procedures to make sales. Or so suggests a survey conducted by Citisoft, the specialist investment management consulting firm.
The survey, into how asset managers produce and circulate information about their products, was conducted amongst a number of global investment management firms with combined assets under management of over USD 2.3 trillion (GBP 1.3 trillion).
The survey highlights the operational changes that are occurring and the renewed focus among firms on winning new business and putting in place systems and procedures to facilitate this drive. Other key findings of the survey include the fact that firms are failing to maximise opportunities by spending too long on the assembly of product information rather than the quality of data. Some of the firms surveyed admitted to having lost prospective business due to inaccurate or incomplete data.
“This survey clearly demonstrates that, after a number of difficult years, leading firms are focusing their energies on improving their sales and marketing efforts. As a result many firms are undertaking strategic operational, process and system changes, to drive revenue as well as cut operational costs,” says Howard Mannion, Assistant Director at Citisoft in London
Companies are moving at different speeds when it comes to the issue of distribution, according to the survey. Some firms recognise the immediate need to drive sales and marketing and are changing their organizational structures to ensure a focus on each part of this process, including managing databases, producing fact sheets and presenting information on company websites. The summary of the survey warns, however, that excessive manual entry and drawing data from multiple sources is still leading to inconsistency that firms quite often do not have the time to identify.
“In Citisoft’s observations, the capabilities that are traditionally lacking in these organisations include the presentation to each target market, such as retail, institutional and high net worth, of a coherent, co-ordinated identity and a well-defined set of products,” adds Dan Houlihan, Managing Director of Citisoft in Boston.
Jonathan Clark, Director of Citisoft in London says the survey highlights the fact that distribution is an area of growing importance.