Do Asset Management IT Departments Stunt or Stimulate Innovation?

There was a time when the IT department was the one place that innovation was found and actively encouraged. As the asset management industry looked to utilise software to transform its business model, IT was tasked with finding and designing the infrastructure to encourage and enable change and innovation across the business. Is this as true today as it was 25 years ago?

I believe that the asset management industry is on the cusp of significant change. The utilisation of smarter technology will be increasingly critical for those firms that will emerge as the winners in this new world. Technology will disrupt and transform almost every element of the business, from the front office, where investment decisions and client interactions will be increasingly digital, through to the back office where processing and storage will need to be far more nimble to support the fast changing market and regulatory needs.

Almost all asset management IT and change management departments have spent the last decade delivering large and complex projects, in parallel with maintaining the current status quo (or ‘keeping the show on the road’). As a result, skill sets and attitudes have evolved accordingly, often within an increasingly conservative nature. Many IT and change professionals have been burnt by the challenge of delivering these projects within an acceptable timeframe and budget and as a consequence most are now very risk averse (although not all would accept this is the case).

Most executives involved in taking key IT decisions continue to work in the same way, using traditional methods and known contacts to slowly upgrade their IT infrastructure with similar large projects and applications. The next generation of technology will stem from different asset management firms, some with radically new business models. These smaller, more nimble firms will require entirely different development approaches to be assessed and managed, as they will increasingly be using technology models that are very different from those being deployed today. The innovators and management of these firms will predominantly be new to our industry.

In my view what firms need to quickly develop is the ability to embrace new technologies and different business models in order to adapt to the developing market needs. In order to keep pace with the changes, especially in the more analytical areas, firms will need to deploy constantly evolving technologies. IT departments will need to adopt a more design-orientated approach and be able to take, manage and mitigate the risks involved in this new way of working.

I suspect that this ‘new world’ is actually closer than many people believe. In my view the successful firms will already be acquiring and developing new talent to manage this, rather than trying to change and develop their current resources. Asset management firms need to consider how best to stay close to the market whilst simultaneously maintaining their existing infrastructure. It may be that these two tasks are not compatible and firms will need to reorganise and supplement the IT department.