Driving portfolio management efficiencies in Singapore: Business boosting lessons for investment managers

By Kaushiq Kodithodika
19 September 2018

Want to get a competitive boost from your business operations?

To benefit from:

  • More responsive client servicing capabilities and happier customers.
  • Reduced risk.
  • Faster and easier regulatory compliance.
  • Lower costs.
  • Greater scalability to grow your business.

For Singapore’s wealth and asset managers, all this and more are possible with an efficient portfolio management environment that optimises the way they construct and manage their investment portfolios. Yet few firms are making the most of the opportunities.

10 efficiency lessons for wealth and asset managers
During our upcoming webinar, to be held on 27 September, we will reveal the findings of the latest WealthBriefingAsia/SS&C Advent research into Singapore’s investment management landscape, and what firms can do to maximise their performance and operational efficiency.

From the research, we’ve identified 10 key takeaways – which we will discuss in detail on the webinar.

These include the most important areas of inefficiency and risk that wealth and asset managers in the market commonly experience in their portfolio management activities. We also draw out the special characteristics of the Singapore market that firms must take into account when formulating their strategies and technology set-ups.

Among the key findings are:

  • Spaghetti infrastructures – Portfolio management at most wealth and asset management firms in Singapore is still carried out using multiple systems. This leads to a highly frustrating and unnecessarily expensive level of manual or offline workarounds – inefficiencies exacerbated by clients’ demands for high performance, and the growing shift towards alternative investments.
  • Pay and headcount pressures make efficiencies essential – High and growing employee salaries mean firms need to drive significant productivity improvements to stay competitive. Minimising manual intervention and equipping advisors with the right tools for the job are crucial to reducing costs and holding on to the best staff in a tight labour market.
  • Reporting is critical – Performance reporting is a major pain point: it remains manually-intensive, while the speed and quality of reports draw considerable criticism. Instead, there is an urgent need for richer, customisable reports that deliver truly personalised information to clients and demonstrate the value added by advisors.
  • Compliance Catch 22 – Compliance costs have caused many firms to put off technology upgrades, yet the ever-growing regulatory burden means leveraging technology to drive efficiencies is increasingly pressing if firms are to protect their profitability and enhance client loyalty.

Competitive advantages await
It is clear that many of Singapore’s wealth and asset managers urgently need to upgrade their systems for constructing, managing, monitoring and reporting on clients’ investment portfolios.

By implementing better technology, investment management institutions can take a huge step towards generating the efficiencies and quality improvements they need in this core area of their business, and thereby sharpen their competitive edge.

Join our webinar on 27 September for more detailed and valuable insights into why an efficient portfolio management environment is so crucial to the success of wealth and asset managers in Singapore today.