The Rise of the Money Management Machines

The asset management industry is currently facing an era of rapid transformation that has the potential to change it out of all recognition. For many fund management firms, there will be a choice between embracing such change, or becoming redundant. We have already seen similar revolutions in other sectors: Amazon has completely re-written the rules of the book retailing world, Netflix has put the video store out of business, and Uber is in the process of revolutionizing the way we use taxis. For many businesses in these sectors, there was a hard choice to be made – adapt or die. Such revolutions tend not to emerge from the established companies that dominate sectors. In my father's business, airlines, the dominant players hoped to shield themselves through established practices that made it tougher for upstarts to change the way the aviation industry served its clients: the rise of the low-cost airline has forced airlines to adapt, many of them launching their own low cost carriers.