In an article for the Journal of Performance Measurement, Mark Goodey, director and senior principal of investment analytics at Eagle Investment Systems, a BNY Mellon firm, provides some thought-provoking ideas on how the industry might evolve with investment performance professionals taking the opportunity to help advance and embrace technology faster than asset management history would suggest.
One of the recurring themes performance professionals are contending with is moving beyond delivering the calculation to being able to tell the story of performance. “The days of providing big, tabulated outputs are behind us, or at least should be,” writes Goodey. “Performance professionals are increasingly expected, by internal and external stakeholders alike, to be storytellers.”
That means explaining key themes and the “story” of how the investment performance was achieved, aided by visual techniques such as pictures, diagrams, and informatics. Goodey also examines cloud technology as part of this disruption narrative.
Concluding, he writes: “We should be able to combine the data with the regulations. We should be able to combine the science with the art, and we should be able to incorporate environmental, social and governance (ESG) information and other new factors into risk models…by taking advantage of the cloud and APIs, calculations can be completed lightning fast, with the capabilities available on demand.”
Goodey added: “Looking more toward the horizon, the impact that emerging technologies such as natural language, voice recognition, AI, blockchain and distributed ledgers could have is yet unknown, but the potential is very exciting.”
Read the full article (page 38)