Over the past six months the team here in MoneyMate carried out a survey which focused on data management issues and challenges facing asset managers. This survey was designed to be a “pulse-check” of the asset management community and examined their attitudes towards a number of issues, in particular data management and outsourcing The survey was primarily run at a number of key industry events including TSAM UK, NICSA’s Annual Conference and ICI’s General Membership Meeting where senior executives gathered to discuss and debate the latest trends..
Survey respondents included executives in various positions at leading asset management firms, including Operations, IT, Distribution and Compliance. The majority (74.2%) of respondents work at organizations managing more than 100 funds.
We issued a press release about the survey results last week and I thought I’d share some of the results on this blog too, as I think it’s quite interesting. The main findings were:
• 50% of respondents named manual processes as the greatest challenge in bringing their product data to market
• 80.7% of respondents are already considering, or would consider outsourcing their data management processes
• 33.3% feel they are currently paying too much to bring their product data to market
The results show the importance of bringing automation into the investment product data management space in order to ensure that timely and accurate data is always available.
I think that the survey results are very much in line with what we are hearing in the market . When I go to events or meet with customers, I am constantly hearing that data quality management is a real issue and that asset managers are frustrated with the time, costs and manual processes involved on a monthly, weekly or quarterly basis. The problem with manual processes is that they are very prone to inaccuracies and inconsistencies and there is no way of guaranteeing that no errors go out to the market. Asset managers are very concerned with potential damage to their reputation if data on their products available in the marketplace is not of the highest possible quality.
Another big driver is regulation. You’ll have seen previous blog posts where I talked about the impact of regulatory scrutiny on data management. We’re definitely seeing evidence that people are really concerned about exposure to the regulator and they want to be able to prove that they have streamlined and watertight processes for all their data management.
Asset managers are showing more willingness to outsource their data management processes also – many recognise that data management is not a core competency. The benefit of outsourcing is that you can outsource to an expert in the field who has done this work for other companies and can offer you an “out of the box” solution that is also easily customisable.
The full press release on the survey is posted on the MoneyMate website.
Posted by Ronan Brennan 
