Technology as a New Frontier for the Financial Industry

Guillaume Lesage, Chief Operating Officer, Amundi.

Guillaume Lesage, Chief Operating Officer, Amundi.

These challenges include increasing pressure on margins, increasing regulation and growing demand for innovative technology and digital solutions across the investment lifecycle. This is why technology is the latest battleground in our industry today,” says Guillaume Lesage, Group Chief Operating Officer at Amundi, Europe’s largest asset manager.

The future in asset management indeed looks bright as the same technological forces that are being so disruptive, present an equal number of opportunities for those who are prepared to embrace change.

While many could blame technology for the disruption to traditional asset and wealth management industry by the emergence of new digitally savvy boutiques, technology is in fact, part of the solution. It is thanks to digitization that players will manage to solve some of these issues and keep up with the latest digital trends that have so deeply transformed the asset managementindustry over the last decade. And today, we are no longer talking about a rapidly changing environment in which financial institutions evolve, but rather a full paradigm shift, which opens up a whole series of opportunities for those who move swiftly and decisively. As it became apparent during the COVID 19 crisis, companies will need an efficient technologyinfrastructure that first proves to be scalable, secure, and cost efficient and also to have the agility and capability to quickly bring solutions that add value to users.

The French asset manager launched its technology platform, Amundi Technology, in 2021 to provide cloud-based software and solutions for asset managers, wholesale distributors and clients in the savings industry.

Amundi Technology offers innovative technology and services to support clients reshaping their operating model. The solutions proposed aim to meet the needs of all savings and asset management actors: asset managers, asset owners, distributors, wealth managers and asset servicers. The ALTO* technology platforms provide clients adaptive and cutting-edge solutions enabling them to focus on their core business.

Mr Lesage says: "The market has recognised the advantage in having software proposed by a financial company.

"Now the market sees there can be offers from software companies, but there can also be offers from financial companies with a strong digital competency.”

Amundi has set a target for Amundi Technology to generate €150m in annual revenue by 2025. The business had 51 customers at the end of March 2023 and took in €13m in revenue in the first quarter of this year, a 35 per cent increase on the same period last year, according to Amundi's latest financial results.

Amundi estimated last year that the addressable market for its technology services in Europe and Asia is €1.6bn annually, €650m of which comes from asset managers, while the rest comes from wealth managers and distributors.

The future in asset management indeed looks bright as the same technological forces that are being so disruptive, present an equal number of opportunities for those who are prepared to embrace change

Harnessing Technology in Sustainable Investing

Nowadays, ESG represents a growing demand and a major organizational challenge that requires rethinking investment strategies, portfolio analysis and decision-making tools. Technology now offers relevant and adapted solutions for developing, building, and deploying ESG policies to empower sustainable and social investing.

The firm launched ALTO Sustainability, a technology analysis tool designed to support investors in decision-making regarding the environmental and social impact of their portfolio.

ALTO Sustainability is powering sustainable and ESG investing, enabling institutional investors, asset and wealth managers to easily access and integrate sustainability data into the ALTO platform to align investment decisions with their ESG and climate goals.

"Within ESG, besides having data, analysis, and access to ratings and reporting, it is important to look into the impact of climate and the new types of impacts such as biodiversity. We have created a new product called ALTO Sustainability which will expand to cover all the needs that will come, for asset managers, financial institutions, banks. It is clearly one the main technological evolutions of the next years."

Investment in Innovation is Key

“Technological innovation can empower portfolio managers with a full range of capabilities from decision making tools, to order management and processing, to client and regulatory reporting across investment strategies,” says Mr Lesage.

“It is imperative that asset managers master these new technologies and invest in innovation and human capital in order to capture the extraordinary opportunities that technology can bring for new products, services or to improve operational efficiencies on behalf of clients and partners.”