Introducing Our New Series: Competing Without Scale Through AI

The industry’s largest asset managers are scaling through acquisitions, convergence, and multi-year AI programs. <$100B firms cannot follow the same path. Our research revealed the everyday pressures: sales stretched across too many financial advisors, marketing too lean to be effective, CRMs failing to provide intelligence, compliance slowing growth, and platforms difficult to penetrate. But these disadvantages can become advantages. AI, applied with focus and discipline, allows smaller firms to reinvent how they sell, market, and operate — with ROI measured in weeks and months, not years.

Within this context, Jacobs & Company is launching a new series designed specifically for leaders of asset managers with < $100B in AUM to provide detailed, practical guidance on how to turn their biggest gaps into asymmetric advantages.  For each issue in the series, we’ll take one of the major challenges highlighted from our findings and show, in concrete terms, how firms can use AI, data and technology to gain an edge.  Each issue will feature a collection of resources, including short, action-oriented papers; workshops; webinars; case studies and other content.  

The Upcoming Series

Here is what is coming:

• Charting a Practical AI Strategy for Growth
  How smaller asset managers succeed with AI initiatives by implementing strategies that deliver ROI in weeks and months. An important related topic that we will also cover is how firms can start with a trusted partner, reap value quickly, and then transition to sustainable in-house capability.
  
  

• Distribution Alpha: Making Lean Teams Act Large
  How AI can increase wholesaler productivity by orders of magnitude by identifying the right financial advisors, preparing smarter meetings, and enabling pipeline throughput. We also want to explain AI uncovers hidden advisor demand and transforms the top of the funnel into a reliable growth engine.
  
  

• Marketing Refined: From Small Teams to Scalable Growth Engines
  How to change marketing into a force multiplier by automating campaigns, cleaning data, and enabling true personalization at scale.