“Exciting but also kind of terrifying” is how Jane Nicholls describes a recent discussion on just one of the potential ramifications of artificial intelligence (AI) for asset management. “It was about how generative AI will change the way people search for content,” she elaborates. “One stat suggested the shift it will enable – from ‘clicks’ to ‘conversation’ – could make as much as 80% of content either unsearchable or irrelevant in the next 12 months.
“That is something we need to get to grips with very quickly as a business because it has such big implications, not least from a Consumer Duty angle. If investors are now able to build their own little bots, whose parameters allow them to search in a nonlinear way, then how do we ensure we publish a document and know the information in it will remain in the necessary state?
“And that is just from a distribution perspective – obviously there are a lot of other implications for the rest of the firm, in terms of the way we think about servicing customers, collating information for investing and so on. Still, this evolution in the way clients search for us and what information they receive back is just going to be fascinating.”
Granular thinking
This sort of granular thinking on the asset manager-client relationship is very much part of the job for Nicholls, who joined Redwheel as head of business development in August 2022.
She began her career in investment in her native Australia in 1998, moving five years later to the UK, where other senior roles have included head of client solutions and business development at JP Morgan Asset Management and global head of ESG client strategy at abrdn.
“The asset management space has changed quite a bit over the time I have worked in it,” she says. “I have seen it play out in different ways but, as things stand, the relationship between asset managers, intermediaries and end-investors is symbiotic – we are all dependent on each other. At the same time, we have to be very clear what we stand for so the parts we have disintermediated from are equally clear as to why they are working with us.
“Importantly, asset management is not a transactional industry – it is based on long-term relationships and, to a certain extent, intangible product. From our perspective, then, we need both to have for ourselves, and to offer investors, real clarity on certain questions: what is the process we are following? What is the performance clients might expect? And what is the service we are going to deliver?
“And the way we do that at Redwheel, as a specialist asset manager, is by thinking very hard about what are the best investment capabilities – that is to say, the most talented investors – we can find? And how do we then set them up for success over the long term so they can deliver consistently – and therefore enable us to play our part in helping intermediaries and end-investors achieve their goals?”
Read the rest of this article in the March issue of Portfolio Adviser magazine
