I
I was recently asked whether there is enough innovation in the asset management sector.
The easy answer would be to say no. But I pushed back. My view is that there is a great deal of innovation out there; the problem is that much of it is answering a question nobody asked.
Early in my career, I worked in structuring on a trading floor, developing equity derivatives and algorithmic strategies. We were a large global team, constantly generating ideas. Some of those ideas found a home in the market. Many didn’t.
But what struck me even then was how rarely we started the process by asking what clients needed. We built something we believed in, and then we went looking for someone to buy it. I saw entire senior teams spend months trying to sell CTA strategies and commodities products to a client whose portfolio was largely in emerging markets. It wasn’t even the same asset class. Nobody had thought to ask what the client was already invested in.
That experience shaped how I think about product strategy.
The alignment gap
The asset management industry generates ideas prolifically. What it does less well is connect those ideas to genuine client problems before committing to them.
Product development too often happens in a vacuum. An investment team identifies an opportunity, builds a compelling case, and then hands it to distribution with an expectation of asset flows. When that doesn’t materialise, the blame tends to land on the sales team. But the problem was upstream.
When I moved into sales leadership, I saw this dynamic from the other side. A new product would launch, and I would be asked to commit to one-, two-, and three-year asset-raising targets – numbers that, frankly, had to be inflated just to get the product approved. Year after year, nobody hit those targets. Not because the products were bad, but because the process of building and selling them was the wrong way around.
The question was never “what problem does this solve for a client?” It was “how much can you raise on the back of it?”
This misalignment holds the industry back. When product, sales and marketing teams operate in silos, each optimising for their own objectives, the client gets lost somewhere in the middle. Product teams think about products. Sales teams think about targets. Marketing teams think about positioning. The common thread of what the end client needs rarely has a single owner.
The behavioural barrier
The uncomfortable truth is that this is a behavioural, rather than structural, problem.
Sales targets create unconscious bias. The moment a salesperson is measured purely on flows, their instinct is to find a way to sell the product in front of them rather than understand what the client needs and work backwards from there. Those two approaches can occasionally produce the same outcome, but by luck, not design.
The same bias operates on the buy side of the conversation. Clients don’t always say what they really mean. People hear what they want to hear, particularly when there is commercial pressure to close a deal. It takes discipline and a different kind of conversation to cut through that and identify what a client’s portfolio is missing, rather than what they might be persuaded to buy.
Technology has compounded this challenge. A fund selector today can pull up performance data, factsheets and peer comparisons in seconds. The information advantage that a sales professional once had is largely gone.
This raises a legitimate question. If a client can find everything online, what is the value of the relationship?
The answer, I would argue, is precisely to understand what a client is really trying to achieve. It is not about just what they’re asking for. It is about being honest when your product isn’t the right fit.
Accountability
Talking about client-centricity is easy. Every firm does it. The harder question is how you hold people accountable for delivering it.
In my current role, I have responsibility across product, sales and marketing. I am acutely aware that this structure only works if everyone is pulling toward a shared objective. When I was purely in sales, I could always point to the product team if something didn’t land. Now the buck sits with me, and that changes how I think about every decision.
Accountability, I would argue, is missing in much of the industry. Not the ideas, not the talent, not even the client data.
What is also missing is a commitment to asking the right questions first. What problem are we trying to solve, for which client, and why are we the right people to solve it?
This should be the priority before a single slide deck gets built or a fund structure gets filed.
The industry doesn’t have an innovation problem. It has a question problem. And until we fix that, no amount of new product launches will close the gap.
