What impact do you anticipate that AI will have on the funds industry and does the industry underestimate this impact?
The acceleration in technological innovation will have an important impact on our industry, both on investment performance and efficiency. Firstly, AI will enable the industry to create further efficiencies, like improving the speed and quality of our research. Secondly, increasing computing power can now help to uncover alpha opportunities by combining new and different data. As with most technological innovation, as an industry we might overestimate the very short-term impact while underestimating the longer-term implications.
Are AI-driven portfolio managers the future of the funds industry?
Portfolio managers will increasingly be supported by AI-driven technology and tools to improve process efficiency and idea generation, as well as portfolio optimisation. To me, the power will lie in combining the strengths of both man and machine and not fully replacing one with the other. Assets managers who are able do this well will likely lead the competition in alpha generation in the future.
If there is one change in asset management that could make firms more efficient and enable them to provider better value to customers, what would it be?
Technology and artificial intelligence should be able to play an important role in better matching client needs with the expertise of asset managers, building tailor-made solutions (tax, policies, risk profile etc) while maintaining asset management scalability to keep costs low.
