Operational Resource Centre

The world has witnessed an unprecedented explosion of data over the last few years. Most of us will be familiar with the term Terabyte, which represents 1012 or 1 trillion bytes of data. But such is the data-drenched world in which we live today that Caltech estimates 463 Exabytes of data will be created, every day, by 2025. One Exabyte is 1018, equivalent to one quintillion bytes!

In this podcast produced by Hedgeweek, in association with SEI, we examine how AI is shaping the future of the asset management industry on the back of SEI's recent white paper, Watsonisation 2.0: The Exponential Pull of Innovation.

Technological advances are shaping the way asset management firms operate, as they look for ways to introduce artificial intelligence applications to monetise data, and improve automation from the front to the back office.

In 2016, SEI issued a paper on what it saw as five major innovations that were causing disruptions both within and outside of their respective industries. The company has revisited those themes, namely: Watsonisation, Googlisation, Amazonisation, Uberisation and Twitterisation, to provide an up-to-date picture of the innovations occurring in industry today. Over the next few months SEI will share its findings and recent developments for each theme.  First up: Watsonisation…

SEI's latest middle office whitepaper, "Remote Working, Covid-19 and Middle Office Outsourcing," explores some of the operations challenges and opportunities caused by Covid-19 lockdowns, woprkplace interruptions and the 'new normal'.

“Climate change and housing affordability are not disconnected. You can mitigate both issues through greater density of housing in less vulnerable areas,” says Oscar Vasquez, COO of Encore Capital Management, in a new whitepaper from SEI.

Adapting to change is challenging at the best of times, but when the pace of change accelerates, it can disorient even the savviest investors. Long accustomed to gauging opportunities in the context of cycles, real estate investors now face a series of bewildering structural changes that will fundamentally transform how they operate in the future.

When last writing about ETF trends in early 2016, we marveled at the torrid pace of growth but also observed a market that was maturing. That process quickly reached a key milestone, with every one of Morningstar’s categories now represented by at least one ETF. Though saturated with product, asset flows continue to gain momentum. We noted two years ago that the “groundwork is also being laid for another phase of rapid growth.” 

As the demand for Collective Investment Trusts (CITs) in Defined Contribution (DC) plans gains momentum, asset managers must build a comprehensive strategy for CIT share class creation and pricing that helps them capitalize on the opportunity without further eroding profitability.

According to the Investment Company Institute (ICI), employer-sponsored retirement plans held assets totalling USD27.1 trillion at the end of 2018, up 12.9 per cent from year-end 2015. Of that, employer-sponsored defined contribution (DC) plans accounted for USD7.5 trillion, of which collective investment trusts (CITs) are estimated to account for 25 per cent by the end of 2020, up from 14 per cent in 2013.