The hurdles

However, there are problems. According to our respondents, the funds industry is not good at handling change. Figure 5 shows that only 7% of respondents thought that the industry was capable of managing or adopting change well – and no one stated that the industry did this “very well”. In contrast, half of the respondents said the industry was either poor or very poor at managing or adopting change. This finding suggests the industry will struggle to achieve the transformation in its operating models that our respondents believe is necessary.

But before handing out admonishment for the industry’s failings to manage change, we ought to ask whose responsibility it is. Figure 6 helps to explain why this issue is so difficult to resolve. When presented with the question, “who is responsible for managing or initiating change?”, the largest group of respondents (40%) said responsibility was “spread across the company”. The second-most popular answer was that responsibility was allocated “on a case-by-case basis” (26%). Our respondents believed that change is the shared responsibility of everyone, which is an admirably democratic sentiment. Unfortunately, change management is complex. We speculate that the broad distribution of responsibility for such tasks may hinder progress.

Figure 7 sheds additional light on this issue. When asked what has been the greatest impediment to adopting change, “lack of resources” was chosen above other factors by our respondents (35%). The message seems to be that without resources allocated for the purpose, efforts to transform the industry in the changing technology environment will struggle.

Another perspective on this subject was offered in figure 8, which examined the question of data, an increasingly hot topic in the industry. Our respondents were asked, “is data in the industry organised, stored and used in a way that facilitates transformation?” Again, they appeared to take a dim view of the industry’s performance. More than three-quarters (77%) said the industry was not managing data in a suitable way to achieve the goal of transforming operational processes. This failing will surely inhibit efforts to prepare for the future.