OV E RV I E W
Tech trends continue to evolve for the post‑pandemic future By Robin Pagnamenta
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t’s been a year that many of us would probably prefer to forget, but for asset managers the pandemic has turbocharged many underlying technology trends that were already in place before anyone had ever heard of Covid-19. The migration of more and more activities onto the cloud has been underway for years, of course – propelled above all by the sheer volumes of data which asset managers now juggle daily in order to shape their investment decisions. But those firms which had already shifted many of their activities into cloud-based solutions well before the pandemic hit last March found the transition to working with a dispersed workforce much easier – and faced less disruption compared to those heavily reliant on on-premise infrastructure and in-house teams of IT staff. John Kain of AWS, the world’s biggest cloud provider, 4 | www.hedgeweek.com
says the charge into the cloud by the industry has been led by those firms which rely on the most data intensive investment strategies – above all the quant funds – but he thinks there is still plenty of room for overall growth as smaller firms and those with different strategies contemplate the long-term future of their tech stack post-pandemic. “I think we’re still relatively early in the overall migration of the asset management industry to the cloud,” says Kain. “There are obviously examples of firms that have completely made that move but I think it really depends on their investment processes.” Cloud-based tools Either way, with more and more asset management activities now being conducted in the cloud, the sophistication of the tools being used by fund managers to make TECHNOLOGY INNOVATIONS IN FOCUS | Aug 2021
