The Content Imperative: Seize the Future or Be Left Behind

The asset management industry is at a crossroads.

While recent macro events have put noticeable pressure on managers’ financial performance, clients’ expectations are higher than ever in the digital age. These two industry trends are pushing managers to explore new strategies to control costs while continuing to meet growing investor demands. On top of this, they’re forced to do it all while focused on generating alpha in an increasingly competitive and fluid investment landscape.

Talk to many industry leaders in today’s environment, and a couple of critical questions emerge: How do we stand out while scaling up? And, how do we do it in a cost-conscious manner?

One surprising answer lies in mastering the content supply chain.

Broadly speaking, content in the asset management industry refers to a range of informational materials and reports distributed across a variety of mediums with the purpose of educating and engaging clients. That said, traditional content workflows and technologies are operationally intensive and often produce inconsistent and disconnected messaging. This is especially evident at the largest asset managers, where content production processes have diverged across marketing, sales, product, and investment teams, and outdated legacy systems remain unchanged over time.

Now, industry players are realizing that content can become their competitive differentiator as clients increasingly demand engaging, personalized messaging that is delivered quickly and in diverse formats. This growing demand, alongside current pain points, is compelling many firms to reevaluate their content creation infrastructure, putting scalability, brand consistency, and cost efficiency into sharp focus.

Asset managers are now looking to easily integrate best in-class technologies to produce, and deliver the content they need. The most advanced managers are forging a path forward through a paradigm shift in how they support the fundamentals of content creation. New solutions are increasingly focused on enabling content to be broken down into the sum of its parts through componentization.

In a componentized world, reports are broken up into smaller pieces of content which are then combined and reused in various ways across the enterprise to create content on the fly. This process streamlines content creation and increases the opportunity for automation, reuse, and personalization, all while improving accuracy and consistency firmwide.

The path to componentization often begins with the most structured types of reports that asset managers produce, such as fact sheets or attribution reports. When done well, structured reports can build rapport with invested clients and intermediaries while also enabling sales and product teams to market and retain assets. However, as asset managers continue to introduce new products and expand into different regions, producing these reports becomes increasingly challenging and operationally intensive.

Now, think about these reports at their component level.

Take attribution reports for example; these reports, typically produced every quarter, are chalked full of insightful commentary, portfolio characteristics, and returns information. Should the stock stories not remain consistent across the various portfolios where a security has a similar effect on relative performance? Could it be helpful for whomever is writing market commentary to have visibility into what other teams may have authored, or even the ability to reuse their commentary where appropriate? Should exhibits within reports be standardized and consistent across all materials displaying the same information? While we’re at it, why not use component relationships and an enterprise taxonomy framework to bring along any required disclosures or footnotes as well?

While the investment management industry is notoriously slow-moving, given its highly regulated and complex nature, the reality is that other industries have been managing content in this fashion for years. In fact, the concept of a “headless CMS” has been around for over a decade in the tech world.

That said, mastering the basic technology stack and operating model underpinning content componentization is no small feat, but once complete, the opportunities for combining and reusing components to create timely and impactful content are endless. Without investment, asset managers must increase headcount and manual effort linearly to meet growth plans, leading to a diluted long-term value and increasingly divergent content across the organization.

Asset managers are overlooking powerful new strategies for producing more engaging and accurate content across more relevant topics, and in doing so, they may be shortchanging clients – and their own long-term growth plans.

Alpha FMC is the leading global wealth and asset management consultancy, and our Client & Digital Practice has built expertise leading some of the industry’s largest content programs over the last decade. If you have any questions or would like to find out more, please contact us here.