2024 Trends, Themes, and Predictions: Strategic and Tactical Client Information Delivery Enhancements Expected

Dru Holmquist

Consulting Principal - Distribution and Client Operations

Dru Holmquist has over 30 years of experience in the financial services industry. He has developed expertise across asset management distribution, investment management, and wealth management technology and operations. Dru is a successful senior leader with a deep track record of collaboration initiation, strategy design, team building, program management and process innovation. He has conducted strategy programs for CRM, client mastering, data architecture, client reporting, client onboarding, trading, research, and portfolio management capabilities. His knowledge spans the equities, fixed income, municipals, commodities, private debt, private equity, real estate, farmland, agri-business, and timber management sectors, as well as the following vehicle types: Mutual Funds, Closed-end Funds, ETFs, UCITs, UITs, Institutional Separate Accounts, SMAs (traditional, dual contract and models), LPs, 529 Plans and REITs.

Prior to joining Cutter Associates, Dru served as Managing Director of Technology for Nuveen Advisory Services, the business organization responsible for delivering the investment and asset management expertise of Nuveen. Dru was responsible for all business applications and technology that supported the Sales, Client Service, Marketing, Product and Fund Administration business teams. He oversaw the deployment of Salesforce as a CRM application, that unified multiple investment manager affiliates by redesigning the lead generation process, sales pipeline stages, sales reporting, distribution analytics, marketing analytics, and client engagement model. In addition, Dru implemented a product and account master, and initiated the business case to begin a client master effort. He was the technology leader that owned the business transformation efforts for the advisory services organization.

Laura Jesson

Senior Research Analyst

Laura Jesson has more than 25 years of experience in the financial services industry as a project manager, business analyst, and consultant. She joined Cutter Associates in 2013. Prior to Cutter, Laura spent eight years at Wells Capital Management and Evergreen Investments, where she managed investment operations projects, including those focused on outsourcing, client reporting, and trade management. She previously worked at Omgeo as a member of the Central Trade Manager (CTM) product design team. Laura started her career at Andersen Consulting (now Accenture) as a process consultant supporting a variety of projects for clients in the financial services industry. Laura earned her bachelor of arts in economics and psychology from Amherst College. She holds the Project Manager Professional (PMP) certification.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

AI Use Cases in Investment Management: Infinite Possibilities 
Business Intelligence Tools
Cutter Benchmarking: Client Reporting
Cutter Benchmarking: Firmwide ESG Capabilities
Cutter Benchmarking: Managing Vendors and Service Providers 
DataOps: In Theory and Practice
Enabling Data Analytics
ESG Data Management 
ESG: It’s a Jungle Out There ─ A Look at the Data Provider Landscape
ESG Investing: One Vision, Many Lenses 
Execution Management Systems
Hybrid Work Arrangements and Their Impact on Firm Culture
Using RPA to Automate Business Processes
The Role of the CRM for Asset Managers

Onawa Promise Lacewell, PhD

Director, Consulting

Onawa Promise Lacewell has a research focus on the impact of disruptive technologies on the financial services sector and on the client-facing technology that wealth managers use to support the digital experience of UHNW and HNW end clients. Specifically, she is interested in how wealth managers use digital portals and mobile apps to support the client experience of UHNW and HNW end clients. Onawa holds a PhD from the University of Missouri.

Recent research assignments and publications include the following:

Behind the Login of Wealth Management Client Portals
Benchmarking of Value-Added Services for UHNW clients
The Rising Popularity of Family Offices
AI Throughout the Wealth Management Lifecycle
UHNW Benchmarking

Jan 30, 2024

The following blog post is one in a series of Cutter 2024 Trends, Themes, and Predictions that provides insights into industry challenges and considerations for firms in 2024 and beyond.

Investment managers face a number of intense pressures that impact client-facing functions ─ rising demand for new, competitive, and unique investment products, expectations for personalized, relevant, and frequent delivery of information to clients through more channels, and an ever-increasing list of regulatory demands that require monitoring, analysis, and compliance.

These pressures, and their combined interplay, are driving the following enhancements in client information delivery:

Improving PDF client report templates to include more data sets and text throughout the report that provide context and explain components and data.
Offering delivery of data to clients in readily consumable, client-friendly formats such as XML data feeds or API calls, in addition to traditional formatted reports (XLSX, CSV, PDF).
Enabling client portals that provide as-needed access to data, interactivity, and data drill down capabilities.
Aligning existing systems and processes — such as those surrounding disclosure management — with an ever-changing, increasingly complex regulatory environment and a growing number of communication channels.

Implementing enhancements to client information delivery requires careful planning. Firms face many technology and support structure considerations for today and the future. New and improved technology solutions and service providers are available to support some facets of these client-facing enhancements (e.g., new offerings from portal and disclosure management providers).

However, investment managers are also grappling with if and how to apply AI and other modern (yet perhaps not fully vetted) technologies that may accelerate their efforts. For support, many firms are struggling to keep up. Teams operate over-capacity and personnel budgets are under the microscope, which leads investment managers to reconsider how best to organize their internal staff and leverage service providers to meet their clients’ needs, and do so with consistency across channels.

We expect client-facing functions to focus on client information delivery improvements to satisfy client demand for more data and new and improved products and services, as well as their expectations for customization, personalization, digitization, and timeliness.

In the year ahead, as your firm plans and executes its client information delivery enhancement efforts, keep an eye out for the following Cutter research and benchmarking surveys and findings:

Client Reporting Benchmarking Survey (Q2 2024)
Portal Vendor Solutions Research (H2 2024)

To learn more about this topic, or speak with a research analyst or consultant, contact us at [email protected].