The asset management industry has long relied on incremental updates to its content workflows. At each step—factsheets, pitchbooks, client reports, RFPs, DDQs—firms have adopted solutions that automate individual processes, but these solutions don’t work together. You end up importing the same data into multiple systems and even manually working up spreadsheets to create the imports. The current state falls short of what true automation should look like in 2025.
The Vision for a Fully Automated Content Ecosystem
Imagine an environment where client service, sales, and marketing teams no longer need to hunt for the latest approved content across disconnected systems. A world where data is seamlessly connected to one system and used to update all your materials in real time, while ensuring consistency in performance metrics, disclosures, and branding. A system that integrates compliance approvals into the content creation process instead of treating it as an afterthought. This is the future asset managers need to work toward—a vertically and horizontally integrated content automation ecosystem.
The Reality: Siloed Solutions & Fragmented Workflows
“75% of asset managers report that their digital budgets are flat or shrinking, reinforcing the need to automate operational processes for efficiency.”
— Alpha FMC, 2024
Today, most firms are still dealing with an outdated approach to content automation, one that reinforces silos rather than breaking them down. This is largely because there was no single, vertically and horizontally integrated platform that spans the entire investment content lifecycle. Instead, asset managers rely on multiple specialized tools:
- Sales & Client Service: Client-facing teams struggle with scattered, inconsistent content. Factsheets, investment commentaries, and pitchbooks are often housed in separate repositories, with no easy way to pull the most recent approved version.
- Authors & Content Creators: Whether it’s investment professionals writing quarterly commentaries or marketing teams updating client and sales materials, different teams rely on separate authoring systems that don’t talk to each other. Formatting issues, duplicative workflows, and manual approval bottlenecks persist.
- Data Management: Perhaps the biggest inefficiency of all, firms still deal with data transfer issues between systems, requiring manual spreadsheet processes and exporting and re-importing between applications. Even firms with data platforms often struggle with last-mile data integration.
While each of these tools offers automation within its own domain, they fail to connect with each other in a way that eliminates friction across the full content workflow. That’s why so many firms remain stuck in the past, unable to fully capitalize on the efficiencies modern automation could provide.
Why Firms Are Still Stuck—and How to Get Unstuck
The truth is most firms don’t even realize they have a problem. Over time, asset managers have accepted the inefficiencies of disconnected systems as “just the way things are.” They’ve spent years working with multiple vendors and relying on manual effort to do data work and handle separate content types—without questioning whether there’s a better way.
The biggest misconception? Thinking that just because a firm has a reporting tool, a sales enablement system, and a compliance workflow, they’re automated. They’re not. Without integration across all content types and all steps of the production lifecycle, firms are simply automating isolated tasks, not the full workflow.
The Data Challenge: The Missing Link in Automation
“AI is no longer an experiment for investment firms—it’s becoming the foundation of operational efficiency, ensuring accuracy and scalability across content workflows.”
— Deloitte, 2024
At the core of the problem is how data is managed and transformed. Most content automation solutions require asset managers to first curate and warehouse all source data before content can be generated. This introduces unnecessary steps, delays, and opportunities for inconsistency.
What’s needed is on-the-fly data transformation, where investment data is dynamically pulled from source systems and mapped directly to content—eliminating manual prep, duplicate copies, and the inefficiencies of intermediary databases and applications.
- Eliminating Data Staging: Instead of exporting, cleaning, and importing data into multiple platforms, modern automation solutions should enable real-time streaming of investment data into content workflows.
- Ensuring Data Consistency: If content is generated directly from source data, firms can eliminate discrepancies that arise from outdated exports or fragmented repositories.
- Reducing Compliance Risk: The fewer manual touchpoints there are, the lower the likelihood of errors in reporting, disclosure updates, or regulatory compliance tracking.
Today, most point solutions don’t solve this problem. They automate document creation but not the data transformation process itself—which means firms are still relying on legacy data prep methods that hinder full automation. Remember, the most reliable sources of investment data remain accounting and performance systems, yet many solutions fail to bridge the gap between raw data and final content.
The Cloud & Vertical Integration as the Path Forward
The solution isn’t just to automate individual workflows—it’s to rethink how content is structured, stored, and distributed across the enterprise. This means embracing cloud-based, vertically integrated platforms that eliminate redundant processes and allow for seamless data flows.
API-First Ecosystems: To truly connect content workflows, asset managers need tools that communicate with one another. Modern automation solutions should leverage open APIs to enable seamless interoperability among accounting, performance, analytics and CRM systems.
- Single Source of Truth: The future of content automation depends on curating data and producing all content in one place, rather than maintaining separate databases and repositories for different materials.
- Dynamic Content Updates: Cloud-based systems should allow real-time updates across all documents, ensuring that when performance numbers or disclosures change, they reflect in relevant pieces of content.
- Automated Compliance Integration: Instead chasing down compliance to approve content, automation should integrate approval workflows into the content creation process itself, ensuring that only compliant materials are distributed.
Competing with Giants: How Mid-Sized Firms Can Win
The largest global asset managers don’t just buy automation tools; they build proprietary platforms designed specifically for their needs. With vast IT budgets and internal development teams, they create custom solutions that integrate data, content, and compliance at a scale smaller firms can’t match.
But that doesn’t mean mid-sized firms are destined to lag behind. There are only two ways to compete with a giant:
- Win on volume – Automate more efficiently, reducing time and resources needed to scale content operations.
- Win on quality of experience – Deliver better, more dynamic, and client-friendly content—without requiring an internal IT army.
The key is automation. The best-run firms, regardless of size, succeed by ensuring their content is accurate, consistent, and customized for client and sales situations.
Why This Matters: Automation That Gets Easier Over Time
“Content componentization is becoming a must-have for asset managers, enabling faster content assembly, personalization, and automation across channels.”
— Alpha FMC, 2024
Asset managers aren’t just looking for automation—they want automation that scales effortlessly. A solution that requires a new setup for every content type isn’t really automated; it’s just a faster version of the old manual process. The best automation platforms make each expansion step easier than the last—a compounding advantage that point solutions can’t match.
This is exactly what Assette does. Instead of forcing firms to rebuild new data connections, templates, and compliance workflows every time they automate a new content type, Assette’s fully integrated approach ensures that once a firm starts with one area—such as factsheets or client reports—expanding to additional content types becomes exponentially easier.
With live data streaming, built-in compliance, and a single-source-of-truth approach, Assette enables firms to scale automation efficiently while reducing complexity and enhancing sales and client communication. Unlike other solutions that require dedicated system administrators or costly cloud migrations, Assette is designed to be marketing-led, minimizing the need for IT intervention and lowering the total cost of ownership. By streamlining operations and reducing administrative burden, firms can automate more with fewer resources—freeing teams to focus on relationships, not system maintenance.
The Big Picture: The Time to Automate is Now
By embracing a truly integrated approach to content automation, firms can ensure they’re not just keeping up with the industry but setting the new standard for efficiency, compliance, and client experience. Whether a firm competes with the giants or serves a niche market, the path forward is the same: automate intelligently, integrate fully, and deliver relevant content—faster. If you’re ready to move beyond fragmented, outdated solutions and take automation to the next level, it’s time to see what Assette can do for you.
