For the panel, Greg was joined by Dr. Carl Salz, Senior VP of Client Data at PIMCO; Terry Yodaiken, Head of Distribution, Business Support & Governance at First Sentier Investors; and George Bliss, Managing Director, of Business Solutions EMEA Client Group at AllianceBernstein.
During the session, the panelists discussed the definition of client AUM and flow — looking at what it is and what it is not — the components required to build this capability and who it is for.
Are client-centric AUM and flow just for global managers that have the budget to build state-of-the-art systems, or is it for smaller asset managers too?
Marketing drivers
‘You don’t want data that’s in the rear-view mirror; you want something relevant and recent that you can act on’ were the words of George Bliss, who also cited platform power, the push on data literacy and a new breed of the sales manager that is hungry for data and wants to be more systematic as key market drivers.
‘Data literacy is bad — we’re hooked on bad data and spreadsheets. We run our businesses on spreadsheets, and we need to have pure data. Scrubbed data and timely data can facilitate a lot of agility for distribution leaders and sales managers’, explained George.
Terry Yodaiken also mentioned the need to differentiate how we see our customers and clients — and the need to service these clients in the most appropriate way — as critical driving factors. ‘How can we hope to effectively service our clients if we don’t know who they are?’
Greg Glass added: ‘Managers are caught in a data vice. The volume of data is increasing all the time — the number of sources and the actual data. It is also quite volatile. On the supply side, there are more and more things to deal with. On the other side, the demand side, there are more and more consumers of the data — each wanting more granularity and data to be delivered faster with more precision and reconciling’.
Capability challenges
When asked about the challenges of building client AUM and flow capabilities, Dr. Carl Salz highlighted three points:
- Make sure the information security foundation is there
- Ensure all third parties are the right partners
- Make sure there’s a continual awareness of where the problems are: the quality gaps that continue to make people distrust the data
‘There will always be an omnibus amount that we can’t break down… but we need to make sure education is out there so that people have a normalised understanding of where transparency is helping them and when there is not enough information to break that down’.
If you missed the panel discussion on the day, you can catch up here.
Powering data-driven decisions
Disparate data costs the asset management industry $1 billion a year in avoidable costs. Great data, on the other hand, creates a much more efficient sector and improves investment managers’ ability to deliver value to investors.
At Aiviq, we enable investment managers to make informed decisions based on accurate and granular client investment data — aggregating data from multiple sources to deliver sales attribution insights.
We produce AUM and flow revenue data matched to client and product masters, supplying this as an enterprise dataset with 160 different use cases across the firm — from finance, front office, and compliance to product and distribution.
Keen to find out how the Aiviq data platform can support you? Speak to our team today.
