Optimising your sales strategy through market intelligence

22/04/2024

Looking to increase investment in your existing funds? Wanting to expand your offering with additional funds you know people are going to want to invest in? Understanding investor behaviour is key to achieving this.

Read on to find out how our new market intelligence tool can help you identify market trends through positions and flows data, so you can identify which markets you should be present in and which investors you should be selling to.

Fund management companies want to grow their assets under management by attracting new investment to their existing funds and opening new successful funds.

To do this, understanding investor behaviour is key – by identifying market trends through positions and flows data, fund management companies can identify which markets they should be present in and which investors they should be selling to. In this article, we run through an example of a fund management company that wants to grow their assets in their retail fixed income fund, using analysis from our new market intelligence tool.

Assessing your market penetration

One way that you can go about finding new distribution channels for your retail fixed income fund is by comparing your own positions and flows data to other retail fixed income funds.

This example, based on fictitious demo data, gives a picture of where the market is today, and the share of each market that the asset manager has. The dark blue bars represent the asset manager’s position value, and the light blue bars represent the position value of other retail fixed income funds.

One can first analyse the existing market penetration broken down by client segment: clearly, the asset manager has reached maturity in terms of the private bank market.

However, the largest client segment holding retail fixed income funds are investment wealth managers, and here the asset manager’s funds represent close to 0% of total assets. Therefore, to grow the assets of their retail fixed income fund, the asset manager might launch a sales strategy targeting investment wealth managers.

Capturing the flows coming from these client segments

Understanding which clients hold assets for our retail fixed income fund is one thing, but to understand who we should be targeting in a sales strategy, it is important to also look at the market dynamics.

In this fictitious example, an area of concern should be the asset manager segment: while a relatively large proportion of fund assets are invested in our funds, outflows that are larger than those experienced by peers.

Deploying the asset manager’s sales teams to meet with these funds of funds, would be a good idea to protect his assets.

On the other hand, investment wealth managers have very large inflows. This makes it an interesting client segment to target: it is not only the main client for retail fixed income, but it is also increasing its position more quickly than other client types.

Helping asset managers improve their distribution strategy

Based on Euroclear’s unique universe of over EUR 3 trillion of funds data, Euroclear FundsPlace’s new market intelligence solution aims to help asset managers improve their fund distribution strategy.

Euroclear FundsPlace not only shows where assets are currently invested, but also where new assets are flowing, observing global market trends in close to real time, and viewing the dynamics of specific markets, products, and client groups.