The sixth annual Alpha FMC Asset Management Product Survey uncovers key insights into the priorities shaping asset managers’ 2025 product roadmaps and highlights the investment areas they are focusing on to maintain a competitive edge.
The survey was completed across 2024 by leaders in Product across 23 firms, representing over $20 trillion in Assets Under Management, and highlights a number of key themes for the future that we are excited to share.
Asset managers are increasingly focused on expansion of their product offerings
While launches in traditional product types and asset classes remain, there is an increased focus on diversifying into less traditional product types, including Alternatives, Active ETFs and Bespoke Solutions to capture market flows, where over 60% of respondents are looking to launch one or more of these product types in the next 12 months.
New initiatives are placing capacity pressures on product teams who are searching for ways to optimize their day-to-day
Survey participants reported an increased emphasis on Product to drive strategic direction and new initiatives alongside their existing responsibilities around lifecycle management and regulatory compliance – typically without more resource. This is resulting in Product Team Bandwidth being reported as a top 3 pain point across the Product Strategy & Design process, the Product Launch process, and in ongoing Lifecycle Management. In response, Product teams are launching projects to optimize resource utilization and their processes with a focus on technology to try to alleviate capacity pressures.
Speed to market remains a hot topic and workflow might be the secret to acceleration
Firms take an average of 8 months to launch new public products (from ideation to operational go-live), while leaders are achieving this in half the time at 4-5 months. Firms are turning to technology and process optimization to improve speed to market and tackle capacity pressures, where 73% of firms either have or are planning to introduce workflow tooling to support product launch.
Product Masters are becoming industry standard, but product data issues persist
85% of firms now have a form of Product Master with the technology now becoming a standard tool used across product teams. However, product data quality and consistency continues to challenge organizations, with 50% of firms facing issues in this area. Product teams are discovering that just implementing a tool is not enough; attention must be paid to the operating model, roles, responsibilities and governance that support the tool to truly unlock the benefits of a Product Master.
Product data is playing an ever-more central role to improve and accelerate decision making
91% of Product teams now review ‘Product Health’ at least annually, but many find themselves struggling to keep up with the complexity, breath and frequency of activity needed to take a truly holistic approach to this without becoming overwhelmed. Increasingly, product teams are developing Product Health Monitoring Frameworks to automatically, consistently and systemically generate the answers to key lifecycle management questions to improve the quality of debate and accelerate the speed of decision making while reducing the FTE needed to regularly produce these insights.
“The influence of technology and AI has been rapidly increasing over the past months and years. We expect this to continue into 2025 and beyond, becoming a key driver of change within the product function. With more sophisticated analytics the product team should focus on leveraging this data to become more efficient and make more informed decisions.”Senior Product Team Member at a Large European Asset Manager
To get ahead of the competition, product teams should make the case to secure budget to support needed transformation.
Only 29% of firms have a dedicated product transformation budget, where firms look to central IT, change or operations budgets to finance this change. Product teams must get better at articulating the organization-wide benefits of change initiatives to secure investment, highlighting benefits such as beating competitors to launches, enabling cross-team insight and analytics as well as introducing additional efficiencies.
With 2025 well underway, the data reveals a number of key focus areas for firms’ product strategy and investment priorities. This includes feasibility assessments for new product types, technology initiatives around the product platform (Product Master, Product Lifecycle Management), investment in ‘Product Heath Monitoring’ as well as wider operating model and efficiency reviews.
With fierce competition for flows expected across 2025, there are several key areas where asset managers are focusing their product strategy in the pursuit of growth. Speed is often crucial, and managers that want to get ahead must focus product development efforts in order to get new launches right, all while ensuring BAU investments are not neglected. Ability to secure investment in and subsequently execute against these initiatives will define the winners and losers for the years to come.
Want to know more?
If you would like to find out more about the Product survey or how Alpha is supporting leading asset managers across these topics, please reach out to us here for more information.
Please note – in addition to a more detailed version of the above, full survey participants received access to a full, personalised report as well as detailed data and breakdowns. Please get in touch if you wish to be involved in future surveys to gain access to the comprehensive results.
Eric is a Senior Manager at Alpha with broad experience in large-scale transformation programs. Eric leads Alpha’s North America Product Proposition and has project experience across product strategy, product lifecycle management, product master, and the overall product function.
Jonny is a Manager at Alpha and part of Alpha’s UK Product Proposition team, with specific expertise in the design and implementation of the technology and data infrastructure that underpins Product teams. Jonny has prior experience working in Product Development at a global Asset Servicer.