A global study of asset management professionals found that investment in technology and data infrastructure are at the top of asset managers' priorities in the post-Covid recovery, with 56% saying their investments will focus on these areas in the next 12 months.
The report, conducted by Fund Europe on behalf of Temenos and entitled The Future of Investment Operations, also found that ESG compliance was a key area of focus for 47% of its respondents.
Asset managers said that data analytics, robotic process automation and AI were critical technologies for their businesses, with 62% naming cloud-native solutions as a pivotal part of their IT strategy.
Meanwhile, 83% of respondents plan to work more closely with asset services and tech partners to improve their operational efficiency.
According to the survey, the top applications for AI are portfolio analytics and performance measurement (60%), data sourcing, cleansing and enrichment (57%), and improving the operational efficiency of middle- and back-office processes (56%).
Barry Lee, business solutions director at Temenos Multifonds, said: "In mapping out the road to recovery, asset servicing firms and fund managers are increasingly looking to take advantage of the tools, analytics and scalability of the cloud.
"Temenos' SaaS-based Explainable AI (XAI), for example, enables our fund administrator clients to use AI to reduce manual interventions, detect potential breakdowns in workflow, and speed up exception management related to price movements. This future-proofs their operations against black-swan events and increases overall efficiency and productivity."
