The Future of Asset Management | Euromoney, London | Matthew Griffin | Investment Keynote Speaker

Firstly, thank you to Alyona for inviting me to chair and keynote at this years EuroMoney Asset Management 2.0 summit in London where some of the financial elite, from Blackrock, UBS, Standard Life and State Street to Innovate Finance and their latest cohort of fintech disruptors.

The aim of this year’s conference was to provide C-Level executives with a forum where members of the investment management community could listen to and debate how innovation and industry digitisation, in the short, medium and long term, would influence their industry, and even though it’s still a very lucrative business to be in it was evident to everyone involved that, like every other industry, the wealth management industry is facing increasing pressures across several key areas, including demographic change, regulation and technology. Couple this with the omni-present pressure to reduce costs, comply with increasing amounts of new regulation and communicate and engage with an increasingly savvy digital first demographic, as well as an increasingly dynamic and complex marketplace, and we had the makings of a great summit.

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During my presentation I shone a light on how technology and social change are accelerating the pace of transformation within the asset management industry, new market opportunities and new asset classes, and the effects that an increasingly aged and skewed population will have on everything from savings and investments to pensions and behaviours. Then, throughout the rest of the day we debated the competition between Man and Machine, and whether Artificial Intelligence (AI) can truly outperform old fashioned skill, experience and gut instinct, the impact that Blockchain and other distributed ledger technologies will have on the industry, how to use big data to build better, more lucrative portfolios, and the rise of Roboadvisories. That said it was also clear that the panels still felt that the public’s attitude to pensions and savings were still out of kilter with their expectations about returns, and that digital ID systems, while important, and still lagging behind.

Then, finally, as the sun set behind London Bridge at the end of the day we capped it all off with sixty minutes worth of pitches and presentations from some of the industries brightest fintechs and rising stars, companies such as Quantopian, a Quant company that is raising the bar when it comes to using AI to find Alpha, and many others.