Patrice Trichon, Brown Brothers Harriman (L), and Kenneth Lamar, Lamar Associates LLC.

For businesses, the pandemic represented a drastic change in how they could do business and work with clients, and for many, they learned new lessons.

In Clear Path Analysis’s report, Fund Technology, Data & Operations, North America 2022, industry leaders from companies including Capco, Lamar Associates, and Pzena Investment Management look at the best ways fund operators can manage fields such as data and talent.

“Our challenge is in how we engage impactfully with our clients. We have spent a lot of time thinking about our websites, materials, and client presentations. We look for opportunities to take world events and apply their impact to their investments.”

Fund operators discussed the biggest challenges with relationships and how this process has evolved since then, especially new technologies, other than the ubiquity of Zoom.

“It has been an interesting road, especially for me, personally. I left Goldman Sachs just before the pandemic and joined [the company]," said Patrice Trichon, Head of Marketing, Client Reporting and Digital, Brown Brothers Harriman. “Our challenge is in how we engage impactfully with our clients. We have spent a lot of time thinking about our websites, materials, and client presentations. We look for opportunities to take world events and apply their impact to their investments.”

A 2021 report, which surveyed professionals at asset management firms on a range of marketing and business issues, backed up this desire for a hybrid future. It found that most had experienced ‘Zoom fatigue’. However, it said, they also “recognised that the future was most certainly digital,” and, “a majority (59%) said that while there is a keenness to get back to some form of in-person meetings.”

“The cultural change is dramatic. Traveling from place-to-place limits your time. Zoom makes things happen faster. The other element that has changed is people’s needs and desire for quantitative data. They want to play with the information and analyse it.”

Kenneth Lamar, Partner, at Lamar Associates LLC, agrees. “The cultural change is dramatic. Traveling from place-to-place limits your time,” he said. “Zoom makes things happen faster. The other element that has changed is people’s needs and desire for quantitative data. They want to play with the information and analyse it.”

Trichon says her company has permanently changed the way it communicates. “We look for every possible way to connect with our clients in different ways. Not just through technology, but also in through what they want to hear,” she says.

Because of this, they are trying to be nimbler, as a way of processing the changes brought on by the pandemic and making sure they are future-proofed in case of another event. “We are leveraging Salesforce and automation. We are also looking at methods of lead generation that considers what information clients and prospects are consuming and how,” she said.

“This development is here to stay. This cultural and social change has been enabled by technology.”

She adds that attention spans have changed and decisions around more engagement are made within 3-4 minutes. “We record a lot of our calls so that we can think about everything that the client has shared with us so that we follow up appropriately.”

Lamar believes the industry won’t go back completely to what it was before. “This development is here to stay. This cultural and social change has been enabled by technology.”

To read the interview in full, and see more from the report, please click here.

 

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