Asset Managers Remain Behind-the-Curve

Living’s latest Ratings report takes an in-depth look at how the IPE Top 100 Global asset managers engage with financial advisers and intermediaries through digital and social media channels. In a highly competitive digital landscape – asset managers are still struggling.
Our call for a greater need of client-centricity from our last ratings is one we repeat again.
Last year we reported that a mere 8% of the world’s leading asset managers were utilising digital communications (across websites and social media) to combine useful functionality and substantive content to support their financial advisors and intermediary communities – this year that number has increased to just 11%.
Taking on the mind-set of asset manager’s Financial Adviser/Intermediary audiences in this report, we evaluated the ease and visibility of what they need most to make their day-to-day easier. To that end, new criteria was added to the analysis, including website personalisation, productivity tools, fund and strategy information, document library and learning materials.
For firms ranking highly on the IPE Top 100 list, their digital and social media engagement did not always align to their AUM successes. Only 40% of the IPE’s Top 20 featured within Living Ratings Top 20, with Russell Investments taking the Living Ratings no. 1 spot, but ranking 92 of the IPE’s Top 100 list.
It’s not all doom and gloom for this space as an impressive 75% were found to be active on LinkedIn, and 71% active on Twitter. Staying well-connected, 50% of firms are actively promoting these social channels on the homepage of their websites.
There are definitely still lessons to be learned for asset managers, with many of them losing sight of client-centricity at the first hurdle. Only 15% of the asset managers we rated provided a clear adviser/intermediary position and only 32% were noted to provide targeted financial adviser/intermediary content.
Living’s CEO, Kate Shaw, comments; “There appears to be a distinct lack of strategy across targeted content, social media and functionality, leading to only a handful of asset managers demonstrating that they have thought about their target audience.”
To read the full report, please download the PDF (button top right)