Building Great Technology in Uncertain Markets

Technology leaders are under constant pressure to deliver better data analytics capabilities, while facing more complex multi-asset portfolios, greater reporting challenges and cost pressures. At Interact London 2023, we brought together a panel of seasoned Chief Technology Officers who shared their views on the future of technology in asset management.

They discussed how the role of technology has changed in recent years. Most significantly, technology no longer sits within one central department – it is embedded in all departments, with one CTO saying, “we are building the community of technologists within a company”.

On the other hand, some challenges remain unchanged. As another speaker noted, “What hasn’t changed is we all have access to the same technology now, but some people do a better job than others, which shows that it’s about what you do, it’s not just the tools themselves. There is still the challenge of mapping technology to the requirements of business; there’s still a lot to be learned and nobody has solved that problem.”

With that in mind, what makes for a successful CTO? Building relationships with business stakeholders remains core to the role, and a large part of that is managing change.

One CTO said of change management: “It’s important to make sure everyone’s on board with it, but it can be quite a scary concept for some people. So, spend time with them working through what that means, and how can you get them to focus on the creativity and the productivity.”

Another perennial challenge is managing difficult discussions about technology investment. “But hopefully everybody realizes that technology is fundamental to the business, delivering operational alpha and strategic differentiation in the market,” said one technology head. “Businesses are looking to us more than previously to deliver those advantages.”

Technical debt remains top-of-mind for all the panelists, who spoke about the importance of understanding where that debt is, how it affects the business, what the root causes are, as well as the commercial implications. In the words of one speaker, “When it comes to deciding when to address a particular technical debt, you need that context, and hopefully, do some forward planning.”

Looking ahead, the speakers said they are most excited about new areas for innovation including edge computing, quantum computing and artificial intelligence.

Finally, while data management has always been important, the increasing prominence of data-dependent technologies will make it even more so. One panelist noted how crucial it is to be able to onboard new datasets, and quickly put them to use. They said: “We've been able to do that rather than constantly having to shuffle data into a data warehouse.”

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