Name: Beyond Traditional Limits: Launching New Investment Capabilities to Unlock Future Growth
Uploaded: 2026-02-17T16:24:05.201Z
Duration: 1 h 8 min 8 s
Description: Beyond Traditional Limits: Launching New Investment Capabilities to Unlock Future Growth

Transcript for "Beyond Traditional Limits: Launching New Investment Capabilities to Unlock Future Growth": Hello, everyone. We're very excited to bring you something new from Nasdaq. And this is a focus on new product trends in the asset management industry. I'm Yani Angelikas, Head of Investment Insights for Capital Access Platforms here at NASDAQ, and I also head NASDAQ eVestment Research. And I have the pleasure of moderating this great panel. In the next hour or so, we have an ambitious agenda to cover such important topics as the competitive landscape, product development trends, product innovation, and other related information. But before diving in further, let me do some quick introductions. I'm pleased to be joined by my NASDAQ colleagues, Russ Elliott, who is head of asset management intelligence within NASDAQ eBestman, Gillian DelSignore, head of investor distribution strategy with NASDAQ indexes, and Craig Feldman, Head of Institutional Index Strategy with Nasdaq indexes as well. But for now, let me turn it over to our good friends at JPES who have the pleasure of joining us for a quick introduction and to elaborate further in terms of how they work with managers and launching new products or vehicles and advising. Thanks very much, Jani. Well, just a few words on JPEGs. We're a specialist marketing communications consultancy but we focus solely on the investment management industry and we deliver marketing communications advice and support to investment managers particularly in the area of product development in what as we all know is a very competitive environment. We comprise of about 25 employees and consultants drawn from senior positions within the investment management industry which is why we've got Debbie here today who I know is known to many people and is the former Global Head of Investment Research at Mercer and we probably work with about 50 asset managers globally in any one year. In terms of new products and the support we give investment managers on those, we identify the demand for those products and advise on product innovation by using our own proprietary investment research, talking to asset owners and drawing on the knowledge of our own consultants. We look very carefully at the criteria in which managers of individual products are selected and advise investment managers on what those criteria are and then we work with clients on marketing communication support, making sure that they have the right marketing collateral and also the right channels for that marketing collateral, whether that's written social media, traditional media, podcasts and overall market presence. And lastly, we advise on thought leadership and thought leadership is crucial to product innovation and we'll be saying a few more words on content and thought leadership later in our discussion. Great, thank you so much Julia and Deb, thank you for joining as well. So to kick things off and to set the stage, Russ, could you take us through the competitive product landscape in the asset management industry and trends specifically around new product development that you've been seeing? Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Yanin. Good to see everybody. So, to kick things off, just wanted to examine the competitive landscape across the industry. So, what you're seeing here is a comprehensive view of how assets are distributed across select investment universes. So, the visual here uses the Hofandel Hirschmann index as our measurement tool, so think of that HHI index as a concentration scorecard. So the beauty of this metric is its simplicity in telling us how competitive or concentrated a market really is. So looking at the x axis, universes further to the left represent more fragmented competitive landscapes where no single player dominates. As we move further to the right, we see increasingly concentrated universes where fewer firms control larger market shares. So, the bubble size corresponds to AUM, so the larger the bubble, the larger the assets in that particular universe. If you notice that vertical line at 1,500 on that HHI scale there, this is a critical threshold regulators use to distinguish market structures. To the left, we have competitive universes like US large value to the right, we see more concentrated spaces in areas such as global multi sector fixed income. While we're not showing all three fifty eVestment public markets universes here, this snapshot reveals, you know, fundamental competitive dynamics across various areas of the market. If we now transition to assess product development and newly marketed product trends, Starting here at the left hand visual depicting the eVestment platform strategy growth across public markets. In a typical quarter, we see up to 700 new strategies added by managers globally. So this reflects managers' strategic focus on increasing visibility with the thousands of allocators who leverage eVestment for manager research. So here we see a ten year view of strategies added. As you may expect, and highlighted by the light blue shading, equity strategies represent the largest portion year over year, with over a thousand equity strategies added annually. Fixed income in dark blue there ranks number two there in 2025 in terms of new strategy additions. Moving to the right chart, which shows inception dates by calendar year. When comparing product added date versus inception date, we can see a lag effect between when a strategy is actually launched and when managers may add it to our platform. This may somewhat be surprising as you think managers may want to maximise their visibility from day one, But we can see over 500 strategies with 2024 inception dates and about 300 for 2025. Again, the light blue shading confirms equity strategies have constituted the largest number of newly launched strategies. If we now drill down one level deeper and examine the specific universes that have attracted the most new product launches, what you're seeing here are the top five universes by asset class that experience the most product additions based upon inception dates between 2021 and 2024. So starting with equities, three of the top five universes were global in nature, with about 170 combined product additions across global All Cap Core, Large Cap Core and Large Cap Growth. Notably, these universes happen to be some of the largest on the eVestment platform, but I would like to also highlight EMX China, perhaps a newer category, capturing around 50 new product launches. In fixed income there, we see a clear tilt towards credit orientated strategies. Global credit and multi asset credit have collectively attracted about $130,000,000,000 in global net allocations since mid-twenty twenty three, and global credit here leads the way with approximately 40 new product launches. Finally, on the hedge front, we see a diverse mix of strategies. Long short equity dominates, but I'll specifically call out digital assets there with 50 new product launches. As many of you know, within each strategy profile, managers specify the underlying vehicles for their products. What's shown here is a proportional view of vehicle additions across all affiliated public and hedge fund strategies the past twenty years. If we rewind to twenty years ago, separately managed accounts, shown by the yellow line there, dominated new product additions. Over the past two decades, we've witnessed, you know, somewhat of a transformation with separately managed accounts seeing the steepest decline. The green line there tells the story of the perhaps new leader, pooled and mutual funds, which have predominantly captured the largest proportion of vehicle additions the past decade. Lastly, and perhaps most notably and focusing on the orange and blue lines there, we see accelerating growth in commingled funds and ETFs. In 2025, over 20% of new vehicle launches were now housed within either commingled or ETF wrappers, perhaps reflecting the industry's appetite towards these more liquid accessible vehicle structures. Drilling down one level deeper to look at vehicle availability by domicile. Starting with pooled funds, shown by the green line, and which includes regulated open ended funds like 40 Act vehicles and USIP funds, we can see some interesting regional patterns. Of those pooled funds with a twenty twenty five inception date, approximately 30% were available for sale in North America and Asia Pacific. However, Europe consistently dominates this space, accounting for the greatest proportion of pooled fund availability. The greater availability of those pooled funds in Europe likely reflects greater investor willingness to utilize pooled vehicles. In contrast, looking at separately managed accounts there in the yellow lines, the greatest availability is in North America. ETFs show a strong North American bias of those ETF vehicles launched in 2025 over 80% are available in North America. So this geographic distribution perhaps reflects global investment preferences and regulatory frameworks that favor different vehicle structures across different markets. Let's kind of shift gears and have a look at what's happening across private markets. So, you're seeing here is an aggregate view of all GP closed end fund structures currently in market or anticipated to come to market. So in total, we're tracking around 1,700 funds across the three main categories: private equity there in blue, private debt in green, and real assets there in purple. So, across the PE funds, we see a large proportion of funds within the venture capital space, followed by buyout strategies. Across private debt, direct lending funds lead the way however, I want to specifically call out the asset backed finance and niche credit funds. These appear to be areas of innovation, with funds focusing on specialised areas like receivables, leases, niche credit sectors, etc, offering a differentiated offering versus the common direct lending offering in the space. Within real assets, real estate funds constitute the largest proportion of funds and lastly, I'll call out the growth in infrastructure as well as venture debt there against hard assets that are certainly an area to watch amidst the current AI boom there. So with that, back to you, Jani. Ross, fantastic as always. Thank you for that great overview. Really interesting to see those trends across equity, fixed income and alternatives and drilling in a bit more into private markets, which we'll touch on in a bit. Now, had a great chart on there in terms of, of course, the increase in ETF popularity. And I think that segues nicely into our next speaker here. Jillian, it'd be great, and I know you have a couple of slides in the deck here, what are your thoughts on new products added from an ETF specific lens? Yeah, thank you, Jani, and thanks for having me. It's great to be here. Russ, that was really fascinating. I love looking at it from a regional view. I have a global team. And while in The Americas, the ETF wrapper dominates what we're doing within index, in places like APAC, for example, other vehicles are still more popular by way of development for a whole host of reasons, some related to concessions and things like that about who's selling them and others just general regulation. And so, it is always really interesting to take it from a different lens. I am, however, going to jump specifically here to US ETF market launch trends and what we've seen. And I think the answer for ETFs, it always seems to be up into the right with everything, whether it be assets, whether it be launches, whether it be new issuers. There's this insatiable appetite for that product, rightfully so. The wrapper is compelling for a whole host of reasons. You're seeing mutual fund managers very interested. I know from my past, I was working at an active manager, when I first got there, mutual fund managers wanted nothing to do with the wrapper. And then when they started utilizing it, they realized how efficient and seamless it was to manage a strategy in that wrapper. And so think you're continuing to see that with the entrance of very significant active asset managers enter this space. So if you look at the slide, last year we saw over 1,000 new products come to market. That was up 44% from 2024, which was seven forty five. We did see the number of issuers fall from the prior year. But let's just pause for a minute on that because if you look at fifty eight and sixty nine, that is a significant number of new issuers. Remember, this is not products. That is new issuers into the market. So brand new asset managers coming in with ETFs. A lot of them are launching one and two products. Others are very sizable firms, the likes of a not last year, but like a capital group, but Dimensional. So, very large players coming into the marketplace with products themselves. Record asset raise, if I were to just double click so far on this year, January, saw $165,000,000,000 into ETFs in The US. That is more than the last three January's combined. So certainly no slowing down from what we see. I do wanna take a second and take a look at some of the bigger trends we've seen in launches. So you can see on the bottom left hand side, active is dominating passive. I mentioned a couple of active managers of note that have been in this space. There's others like JP Morgan that continue to play a huge role in active ETFs. But you're seeing that the blue is far larger than the green in that chart, and that trend is continuing. Active ETFs are punching well above their weight class as it relates to flows relative to its passive counterparts, given the relative assets under management within those two categories. However, I think it's really important to take a look at that third chart over the launches. So if you think about what's captured within active, it is things like options overlay, it's things like cryptocurrency, it's things like buffers. So these are products that depending on your definition of active may or may not actually fit the bill. So I think it's important. Yes, active is driving. And I do believe that is going to continue. But let's understand what active means. And there are certainly some active equity products that we think about it traditionally, and active fixed income which continue to play a huge role. But there are other definitions of active that are making their way in here that I think are bloating the number slightly. We're also seeing it bloat the number of launches. Because if you look at that top number, single stocks, two ninety one of the launches in 2025 were single stock ETFs. And then if you go down a layer further, you have the options overlay. That's where you're going to find some of these buffered ETFs, where you're launching one a month in some cases. So, again, I don't think the trend is changing based on my comments. I think the trend is still there. Active is driving growth. Active is driving a lot of flows. But I think we need to understand what some of these numbers are. And don't be so shocked by some of the numbers that you see because some of them are being driven by these products that are launching in mass in some sense. With that, maybe one more comment I'd have on launches that I think is going to drive a lot of what we pay attention to for the rest of the year and into the following coming years is this idea of dual share class. So I think we all probably saw that that was approved. A number of issuers were approved to launch dual share class ETFs over the course of the last few months when that was approved by the regulatory bodies. So it's still unknown what that's going to look like. It could flood the market. I don't think so. I think people are going to come at it with a bit more caution. But I do think it's a wild card that as an ETF industry we're paying a lot of attention to, to see which managers that received approval actually do begin to put dual share classes of their existing mutual funds into the ETF market. So just something for us to sort of pin a pin in and pay attention to as we go forward. And this is something I just wanted to spend a couple seconds on. I think one of the things that Russ was talking about was availability and what's available in what markets by way of which structure. Structure. I think one of the things that for those new to the ETF market may not fully appreciate the journey an ETF goes on when it is launched in the marketplace. So when an ETF first comes to market, you would naturally think, oh, it's exchange traded. Everybody can buy it. That's not true. Your initial buyers of an ETF are going to be retail investors, which are playing a much more significant role. You're seeing for the first time ever really products launched specifically dedicated to retail investors or targeted towards retail investors and registered investment advisors. So, you sort of mass marketing to retail and the other registered investment advisors is very much it's not scalable. Put it simply, it's not scalable. There are thousands of registered investment advisors across the country and you can't really access them en masse. And so, it can be challenging. And so, as a new issuer, you really have to understand where are those first capital dollars coming from? And are you going to be marketing to those two markets to try to get yourself to scale in order to get platform approval at some the independent broker dealers, wirehouses, etcetera, etcetera, as you go down the line. Just It's important to understand as you're thinking about bringing your product into market and how you plan to hit those various milestones from capital raise perspective to get the proper placement and approval that you need to scale. So, I'll pause there, Jani, and turn it back to you. Gillian, thanks so much. It's always great hearing your perspective and enthusiasm around it because anything up into the right, you deserve to have that enthusiasm around it. And it's just amazing to see the utilization of the wrapper in so many different ways. Right? And also by so many different investors, you just covered the retail segment and now we're going to juxtapose that with views from an institutional lens. So let me turn that over to Craig insights. Yeah, thanks so much, Gianni. Pleasure to be here. And I will say it's great when you have two respective subject matter experts setting the table for you to illustrate some of the points that you want to say. So thank you, Julian and Ross. I will say this, you know, certainly it's not fully mature, but the use of the ETF among institutions is growing. You know, the fact that the ETF is a wrapper in a vehicle has become more of a catchall to embed several strategies a cost efficient way to get asset class exposure. Institutions more and more are using it for, again, it be diversification or risk management, cost efficiency, tax strategy basis, and the like. We're starting to see growing adoption across a multitude of what I would say are institutions. I'd say certainly if we look at the last few years, the growth has come more centrally in the endowment and foundation space. But, and certainly I'd say a little bit lagging behind that is probably the sovereign wealth funds and maybe the private or the corporate pension, and then some of the public pensions to follow. But certainly as the wrapper becomes more prolific, as people can use it more as a portfolio management tool, even as a cash equitization tool, right, to manage transition into rebalancing against replication strategies or in conjunction with derivatives, that use will continue. I think another thing what it does is it opens up some asset classes which previously weren't as accessible. Certainly in digital assets, regardless of which sort of adoption pathway institution takes, ETFs are really the primary vehicle that a lot of institutions are getting exposure to, whether that be in a single asset or multi asset within the overall digital asset space. And as that momentum increases, we expect to see it there. Private markets, which are obviously, you know, very, very, which are democratizing more and more. And as the sort of opaqueness of the asset class lessening the liquidity and some of the valuation challenges get addressed and moves down to the retail base. I think certainly down the line, we haven't seen it just yet, which is expected, but down the line, that may be a vehicle which encapsulates some of that strategy exposure of people looking to get across the private assets as well. So certainly, definitely a positive trajectory, slow and measured, but certainly picking up steam with investment allocations of institutions in the ETF rep. Fantastic. Thanks for that, Craig. And really, you know, to state the obvious, the institutional world is just so important, given the evolution of the products that they now have to be able to utilize. And of course, as they're still the ones writing the big tickets for the managers at the end of the day. So with this in mind, let me turn it over to Julian and Deb in terms of how does the data and comments align with what they just ran through and then what Russ had also talked about with what you're seeing and hearing with respect to strategy launches in recent periods. Yeah, I mean, I think if I take the sort of first part of that first, in terms of data alignment, what we're seeing from our clients, thinking about where they're going to invest in order to achieve their objectives, very much aligned to what Russ referenced in his slides. So as Julian mentioned, JPES undertakes an asset owner survey once a year. So we undertook that in about Q3 last year, and we're talking across 40 institutional clients with over £5,000,000,000,000 of assets. And what they were thinking about top of mind for them was how are you managing risks around geopolitical risks, market concentration, and really thinking about diversification within the portfolio, making sure they're getting the best risk returns. So for them, they were thinking about increasing emerging markets, again, exactly the same as Russ talked about. Asset backed finance came up as something they were interested in, and also hedge funds as a way of diversifying what's in the portfolio. Also still strong demand for infrastructure, albeit a little bit lower than last year, and for private markets. So I think clients are thinking about their portfolio in a very holistic way and making sure that everything within the portfolio is giving them that best risk return that they can achieve in the environment that we have. Do you know that way you want to pick up the comment about strategies? Yes, would. Just on strategies, first of all, I think it's no surprise that ETFs are very popular and we're seeing a number of managers use those vehicles as their vehicle of choice for product innovation and I know in some regions there are tax advantages to that but they also in the public market space are a good answer to passive investment management because there's a lot of specialist ETFs being launched and a lot of tilted ETFs which try and steal an advantage on the BM off of the big trend towards passive management. So ETFs are very good to tilt and offer something slightly different in the public market space to traditional passive management. So we are seeing a number of specialist ETF launches across regions and across different investment managers. In terms of the vehicle and some of the considerations around the vehicles used, when you're starting out on delivering your product to the marketplace, you've got to really spend a lot of time talking to your clients about what they actually want and what are the most appropriate vehicles in that context. And also something that managers are not always good at doing is trying to understand product innovation and the launch of new products in the context of the client's whole portfolio. That's really, really important. Once you've done that, then it's all about in terms of the actual vehicles themselves making sure that there's good operational due diligence that the process within vehicles is very transparent as well as the competitive advantages of why you're offering that strategy in the first place. And just to talk about product innovation for a moment in terms of the vehicles used, one of the big trends I think within the industry is how the different routes to the underlying clients are coming together in terms of the barriers to entry, the quality of due diligence and the type of people looking and accepting new products in the institutional space but also in the wealth management retail space because the standards which were traditionally set by the institutional space are very much replicated in the wealth management and retail space. So the same quality of product innovation, the same delivery of vehicles, same explanation of what's going on within those vehicles in terms of investment strategy, but also ensuring the transparency in the process that there are no conflicts of interest, which is particularly relevant in the area of private markets for a moment. The quality of due diligence involved has come together across the institutional retail and wealth management space and one of the reasons for that is that the gatekeepers to the retail wealth management space are often ex investment consultants. In the institutional space, if you're used to dealing with investment consultants in terms of getting your products accepted, then it's often the same types of people are getting your products accepted in the wealth management and retail space. So the gatekeepers are coming together if you want. So the quality of product development, the quality of the vehicle, the explanation of what goes on inside that vehicle is it's pretty much similar now across whatever channel you're trying to market your products to. So I think that's a very important point I'd like to make and I don't Debbie I think you have one or two more points. Yeah just two very quick points I think when you're thinking about launching a vehicle, is you need to think about what is your tolerance as a manager for keeping that vehicle open if it doesn't do what you expect it to do. So, you know, I've been around for forty years and the number of times maybe somebody from marketing has said to me, this strategy is going to grow. I've got this line of clients coming. And, you know, maybe market circumstances change. If you think about, for example, China funds, where, you know, when people get themselves in a position to be able to launch those funds, it may be that the demand has dissipated a little bit. So that's one thing. And then the second thing from a consultant perspective is avoid dilution of your resources. So if you're launching a new fund, what are you not doing in order to have the resources to be able to launch that new fund? I'm sure that some people will hire more resources. It may be that you want to stretch people a little bit further. And then perhaps this is the worst answer I've always heard. The portfolio manager, you know, this is just a strategy, an extension of a strategy they already manage. It's not going be difficult for them to manage this. In my sort of thinking, in my cynical sense, I actually think that is really not good news for the end client, because which fund is the manager going to be focusing on? Will they focus on the new fund going out and gathering assets? It's the new shiny toy. Or are they really focusing on where their clients already invested? And if I was a client that was already invested, I want that to be the latter, not them focusing on something new. You know, who gets the most attention? So just think about how you talk about that with your clients. That's fantastic. Thank you both, Deb, Julian. Really great insights. And, you know, Julian, you touched on product innovation, right? Thanks for teasing that. We'll get to that in more detail in a bit. Deb, I think that last point, I appreciate your honesty and cynicism, right? It's part of the landscape is the reality. But the last point that you made there in terms of the shining new Tory versus being already invested in it, that's something that I think leads us nicely into the next section where Russ, here we're going to talk about new products and competitive universe. Right? And a lot of already existing investments are in competitive universe. So, Russ, can you share some of the related data in this section? Yeah, absolutely. Thanks, Jani. So, if we look at the actual outcomes in terms of the asset gathering for newly launched strategies, again just across select universes you see here. So, this analysis encompasses products that have launched within the past ten years. So, the summary for each universe depicts the outcomes three years post launch for those strategies. So, we're measuring whether strategies are gaining assets while simultaneously tracking their market share. The grey portions of each bar there represent strategies that are no longer active, could include strategies that have been liquidated or perhaps merged with another strategy. If we take, for example, multi asset credit, we can see that over 60% of strategies launched over the past decade have successfully gathered assets at least three years into their life. More encouragingly perhaps, bulk of these strategies represented by that lighter blue portion of the bar there have also captured increasing market share. If we look across the equity space, almost half of the newer global All Cap Core and EMX China strategies achieved asset growth three years into their life cycle. Looking at EMX China and multi asset credit, which are generally newer universes on our platform relative to some of the others that you see here, we can see more managers are staying active relative to the perhaps more established universes such as The US large core. So, summary, across at least these universes represented here, we can fairly consistently see that over 40% of those new strategies were successful in terms of gaining assets and capturing market share three years in. If we now dig into the EM ex China universe specifically, so EM equity strategy is obviously nothing new there. I think though it's really important just to note that A shares weren't actually added to the EM benchmark until around 2018. So, the EMX China theme became a desired opportunity after, you know, perhaps a couple of developments. First, EM equity strategies regained their attractiveness and second, China began underperforming relative to other EM countries. So, what you're seeing here is the asset growth organised by product inception date. So, the dark green and yellow shading represents the 10 oldest strategies in the universe and looking at the older strategies as of end of Q3, we can see that they only account for a fraction of the assets in the universe. The strategies represented in blue tell a different story, so these have later inception dates, typically from 2021 onwards there, and we can see numerous strategies that have achieved sizable growth in a relatively short period. In total, this universe is about 23,000,000,000 in AUM and what we're seeing here suggests that timing perhaps, rather than having a first mover advantage, has been important. So, summary, EMX China appears to have been an area of significant allocator interest precisely when these new products have been launched, demonstrating that perhaps timing played a role in product success. Thanks for laying that out, Russ. And Deb, it looks like we may have started a little trend here in terms of China and EMX China, right? So let me go to a couple of questions for yourself and Julian, if I may, So on this broader what frameworks should managers use to validate market appetite, whether by geography and channel, for new product concepts before actually committing resources? Yeah, mean, obviously, firstly, they've got to find out what their clients' issues are. What are clients trying to do? Are they trying to find new streams of income, regular streams of income, which I think led to some of the work around secure finance? Do they have certain risk tolerances that they've got to manage that you as a manager would be able to help them with this product? So talk to your clients first thing. Secondly, broadening that a little bit, use Salesforce, whatever your CRM approach is within your firm, find out what all of your Salesforce are talking to clients about. What's the feedback from clients? What are you trying to understand as a firm to put clients first? Undertake surveys of your clients, potential clients, as broadly as you can. Just try and understand what's happening in the marketplace and what they're looking for. Also, are the markets saturated? So going back to the EMX China, it's interesting that some of those people launch those products very early on. And then understanding really what it is you're trying to do with the products you want to launch. Where is that going to fit into the whole client's portfolio? What's it going to deliver for them? And then perhaps one of the critical points is the consultant. So coming back to my background and where can you create a partnership situation? So for example, I can think of multi asset credit, secure finance, where Mercer worked with clients to actually understand what the client need was. And there was everyone working together to try and then build intellectual capital, which Julian mentioned earlier on, really supports the case for investing in that product, in that universe, then clients being more willing to help fund that when you actually launch as an asset manager. So I think that helps you along the way if you can understand the client's needs, how you can help them and finding a way to create a vehicle and an access to that particular product. That's great. Thanks so much, Deb. And with that, let me just I think it's a good segue to go maybe over to Julian here in terms of how would you say existing managers protect their franchises? Well, it's a very good question. They protect their franchise by having a high profile in the marketplace. Think successful managers can get a little complacent and drop their profile in the marketplace and there's nothing like a bit of competition for them to realize they have to increase that profile. So you have to constantly remind people why you're offering the products you do, how they fit in with your skill set, what are your competitive advantages, what are the differentiating characteristics of your product in a competitive universe. That's really important and one thing which is close to my heart, it reflects my past experience in the asset management industry. If a product or a strategy is having a tough time, don't hide. That's the time you have to raise your market profile. We all know the channels on which you can do that from really smart marketing, collateral, all those podcasts, webcasts, social media, traditional media exposure. But it's really important that you remind people of the quality of your thought leadership and you get your thought leadership through those channels into the marketplace even when you're having a tough time which will make cloud stick with you because you're constantly reminding them why they went with you in the first place and that's really important. So I can't emphasize enough if you're trying to protect your existing franchise you need to constantly remind people of what you're good at, why you're good at it. You do that through thought leadership but that's doubly important if that particular strategy is having a tough time. And if you do that, the quality of your thought leadership in particular will protect your franchise. Thank you. I love that, Joanna, as you were going through that, I just started thinking to myself, just as the markets are inherently dynamic, and dynamic beasts onto themselves, the quote unquote kind of product protection needs to be dynamic as well too. So I think that's a great point. There are too many managers I think who sometimes cut back on their market profile either when budgets are tight or whether they're having a tough time and as I said the best managers in our experience are the ones who do the exact opposite. They actually raise their market profile in those sorts of conditions. And that's the best way to protect your franchise. Quite frankly, the area of product innovation is the best way to get momentum into your new products too. Sure. Very fair. Now maybe moving on to our next topic. I think it's really the exciting aspect and Julian had done a nice job teasing this out earlier, right? In terms of product innovation and what we'll do here, we'll kind of go in reverse order. Let me start off with Deb and Julian for their thoughts and I'll throw out a couple of questions. One, is the product innovation really manager driven or do you see as more investor consultant and marketplace driven? And number two, what resource considerations should be factored into new product development? By this I mean, additional staffing for research, distribution, sales efforts and the like. So if you guys can split up those two questions, it'd be great. Okay, well, think I was going to start on this and really look at the manager driven versus marketplace driven. Then I think Debbie is going to talk about the investor and consultant role in this. I mean the answer is it should be both manager driven and marketplace driven. Why manager driven? Well you've got to have the skill set in the first place and then you've got to have the internal resources to build around product innovation and launch that product. So I think that's really important. You've got to do a lot of research on the marketplace. What do clients want? Is that aligned with what you can offer them? That's really important which involves a lot of research so the way in the long run to save money in product innovation and product development and product launches is to make sure you've done your homework both internal research and external research to understand what a client might want from you and then in terms of being manager driven understand that you've got the skill set to do that and that I think brings three groups of people together in an investment management firm. First of all, innovation should sit at the heart of any investment management firm and I think in today's environment managers have generally got better at that and understand that the success of their business both today and in the future is based on that. And the inputs into that should be using your sales and marketing force who are the interface with the marketplace to understand their inputs, understand the inputs from the investment managers themselves who are essentially the product managers, but also then overlay that with the business case for doing it, looking at the overall business case for launching products and indeed what's driving product innovation. So I would say when you're looking at product innovation, it should be doing your homework about the marketplace but it should be manager driven in order to bring and understand the skill sets required to make that product innovation a success to the outside world. So it's a bit of both, if you like. Then I'm going to hand over to Debbie to talk about the investors themselves and the role of investment consultants. Yeah, thanks Julian. So I think as Julian and I both said for previous questions, the days of producing a product and clients will come has gone. You know, when I first started doing manager research over probably twenty five years ago, there was a tendency to think, here's a product, clients will love this, they'll invest here. That doesn't work anyway. It has to be much more of this collaboration and thinking about how it works for clients. What differentiates your offering? Asset managers need be really, really clear and crisp on what it is that differentiates them from the other big universes that we saw in Russ's slides earlier on. And then why do you want to launch this now? So as Julian said, what's the accompanying intellectual capital that's going alongside that? And then when you come to the resources, you know, do you have the resources to run this strategy? I touched earlier on about the portfolio manager resources, but it's so important to think about back office resources, any regulation or compliance issues that you need to address. What aspects of those have you set everything up? Where are you in terms of your communication, as Julian said? Actually getting, I think we call it getting all your ducks in a row is really quite important. It's a very long process and I think perhaps it's very easy to sort of get swept up in that we really think this is an exciting product, but there's so much behind the scenes that has to happen before you get there. Internal discussions, making sure consumer duty, for example, is really important here in The UK, making sure that that is all addressed. Now, consultants will help with this and they will help drive where that demand comes from. They'll also help think about how that can be best implemented. But it has, as I said earlier, it has created new universes. So again, asset credit, secure finance were really developed to match a client specific need. A client said to us, came to us and said, I have a cash flow matching that I need to do. So they created these universes. But then you have to actually then go develop that further to make sure more clients are aware of what it is you're offering, why you should be offering it and what it is that you're able to do for them. And if you can get everything set up for that with the right vehicles, then hopefully working with the consultant, the dollars should follow. They're not guaranteed, but they should follow. Fantastic, thank you both for those insights. Julian, did you have anything else to add? Yeah, just wanted to make one last point. The clarity of communication around product innovation and offering to the product to the marketplace is really, really important. If a potential investor has to work harder than with you and understanding how we're putting together this product, how it's managed, the transparency of what it's offering to a client. If they will have to work harder with your product versus a competitor product, they'll go with the competitors and very often we see managers not understand why when they've got a great product it's not resonating with the marketplace and it's simply because of the way they communicate the advantages of it and what's going on inside that product what their competitive advantages are how that product is managed. If that's not absolutely clear and it's very competitive in terms of clarity with your competitors, then you fall by the wayside relative to other managers. So one of the areas that we work hardest on with our clients is making sure it's really easy to understand why a product is being offered to a client. It's there to do what a client wants and if you make that process of understanding the communications process as clear as possible, then it's the best way to gain momentum behind new products and ensuring they land well with potential investors and indeed the gatekeepers, investment consultants and ex investment consultants who are the gatekeepers often nowadays in the retail wealth management space. That's great. Thanks for adding that, Julian. Remarkably well said and taking a step back, I'm even happier that I started with you two for this section because I think it leads very nicely into Jillian next. And Jillian, I was just looking at the slide that you had shown earlier, right? In terms of the 2025 U. S. ETF market launch trenches, right? The sheer active in terms of the domination there. The launches with single stock factor exposure option overlay. So there's a lot out there, but from your perspective, can you discuss product innovation for ETFs from the voice of the client and the investor feedback perspective, more importantly? Yeah, before we get there, been in distribution for twenty six years now, and everything that Julian and Deb just said, I want to bold, underline, italicize, blow up the font. I feel like you have my talk track, not for this webcast, but for every other minute of my life. For those listening, they just nailed it for you. And I'm just here to emphasize that further with some additional comments. But mic drop, those are the most critical, critical, critical, critical components. ETFs, and you could insert whatever vehicle you want to, they're sold, not bought. Let's say that again. They are sold, not bought. And so, I looked at that chart of the China strategies, and I looked at that and I thought, wow, the folks in the blue, yeah, time is important. But they probably had really good thought leadership. They probably had competitive fees. They probably had a great distribution force. They probably knew all the centers of influence to get their product approved. I look at that through a sales lens and say, no, I don't know if that was timing. I think they just probably got it right. So there's all these different things that you have to consider. And I think about the number of new issuers that have come into the ETF market in the last couple of years, even just alone the last two years. And you think about those, that the ones that are going to be successful, and what is that tie that binds? And it's everything that they just articulated to you. Yes, they have a strategy that's compelling and they've priced it properly and they know their competitive landscape, But you also have to know who are you? Who are you in this market? How do you differentiate? Do people care about your product? Do they know who you are? Does your brand matter? Can they trust you? Are you an expert in that space? Where does your product fit in their portfolio? Help them understand all of these things. If you don't, it's just not going to work. And so, those things are so, so critical. But Yoni, to your point, I do think it starts with what Deb very articulately earlier said, the voice of client. We call it voice of investor, voice of client. You said talk to your investors and talk to your sales teams, we call that voice of investor, voice of client. And my team is responsible for gathering that information. I was speaking at a retail investor conference a couple of months ago, and one of the audience members asked me, how do you know a product's going to be successful? You don't, is the short answer. But my team every day is spending our time in the field with financial advisors, gathering intel from the different retail brokerage platforms of which we participate in, talking to the ETF issuer salespeople that are our clients, and understanding what are investors asking for? What are they posting about on blogs that are telling us what they might want by way of a product? What are the issuers, clients, or salespeople telling us they're hearing from financial advisors? We can then take that back to our product development folks and they can start thinking about indexes that might respond to that. And so it's been critically important. I will say to your point around the manager also playing a role here, I will call out a specific example where we've seen this work recently where we've seen this proliferation of derivatives based ETFs. The trend is income. The trend is investors want income. There's this insatiable appetite for yield for income. Well, are some managers that have looked out into the ecosystem and they said, well, we're seeing derivatives play a role. There's this whole category of, in this example, auto callables. There's all these structured notes that set out in the market, and there's an inefficiency there. What if we brought that into the ETF wrapper and diversified it and made available to investors? Well, they've done that. So, in that case, they took a trend that we hear from voice of investor, voice of client, income, income, income, and they took something out there that they knew they had an expertise in and also then saw separately a demand in another vehicle and brought those two things together, or all those things together for that matter. And we're seeing that start to really take off by way of interest because they addressed a need. It wasn't an asset manager problem, it was an investor problem. And they solved it with their own expertise. So, I think bringing these conversations together, that's the way that we observe the marketplace and see successful launches, really starting at that core of knowing your client, but then potentially just observing what you're seeing trend wise throughout the market too. So, Yoni, I'll turn it back to you. It's just tying a bow and just really amplifying everything that you've heard from Deb and Julie, and I could not agree more. No, thanks so much for that, Jillian, from a micro bottom up perspective. It's great to see the three of you evangelize about the same thing. All extremely sensible and noteworthy. Thank you. Now, let me balance this out by turning over to Craig here. Craig, could you speak to the different approaches institutions are taking with regards to private markets and particularly digital assets, which of course have been very volatile recently. You've seen some sharp sell offs from the crypto highs over the past couple of few months. And I know you have a slide up here specifically regarding digital assets. Yeah, thanks, Jani. Maybe I'll start with the digital assets given the slide, but also given it's very, very topical and what's happening to the market. It's an interesting observation, right? Whether it's some kind of decoupling from the debasement trade, which sort of gave a bit to Bitcoin others from the rally in gold and silver, or whether it's more of a general umbrella of a risk off mindset, you know, sweeping through investors. Certainly, it's been a volatile asset class, certainly, you know, since the beginning of the year and a little bit beyond that. But I think that being said, if you took a broader perspective and looked at major institutional investor surveys and sentiment, clearly investors want to get more exposure to the digital asset front over the next few years, right? They said it explicitly. And within that, you know, beyond Bitcoin, right? So looking at assets, looking at the single asset sort of exposures that they want driven by Bitcoin, given its market cap and, you know, weight in market from an overall perspective, but also looking beyond that into basket products and looking at products where they can get some of that exposure. It's interesting, I think, well to note the differentiation in how institutions are going into this space, right? Some of them are sort of employing this cautious experimentation, Dipping their toe in, really slowly getting accustomed to having this as an exposure within their overall investment and asset allocation, you know, versus those who are more, I would say, at strategic conviction, right? And we've seen that with a few, you know, larger US university endowments where they go, they're not going all in, but they're going in and they're going in with sizable allocations there from the start in terms of getting that exposure. And then I would say there's some that execute more of a tactical discipline, right? So the pathway of sort of being very, very risk, having very, very risk aware strategies that sort of hold the strategy and making sure that their infrastructure operationally custodian wise is very well established. So again, I think we're starting to see in digital assets, the momentum there, certainly the road to tokenization, which is gaining momentum is a driver of that as well. But certainly single asset products as starting points, but evolving into getting multi asset exposure across those points and basket products, which we're starting to see more prolific in the market. In terms of private markets, certainly, you know, as I mentioned earlier, that asset class becomes more and more democratized. People look for benchmarks that give them more appropriate representations of the exposures that they have, whether in the asset class, sub asset class category. Plenty of institutions are still comparing their private market exposure to public market benchmarks and that's shifting as well. You know, the regulatory environment is evolving as well, where private markets now could be, you know, very soon a part of retirement plan assets and four zero one ks plans, right? So that starts to proliferate it more. Certainly from ourselves, we see that as a trend. We're speaking to a lot of institutions. We've recently launched a suite of private capital indexes across real assets, private equity, private debt, and some of the sub asset classes amongst that, because we see a need for greater transparency and robustness in this space. We've launched that both outright for benchmarking, but also within the scope and in conjunction with our investment analytics platforms and data analytics. So we're certainly very optimistic about this space. What we see is driving innovation and adoption continuing for some time to come. Thank you, Craig, for vantage point. And going back to the digital assets, right? It's always exciting to see institutions come in and legitimize a certain asset class. So I really think it brings a lot of weight to it also. So thanks for your comments on that. All right. Now we're pivoting to our final section here and it's been a great, great conversation so far. And this is obviously a vital part of the economics from a product perspective, and we're going to get into fees and pricing. So, with that, Russ, can you share some of the insights regarding fees and pricing for newly launched products versus those more established ones? Yeah, absolutely, Yani. So, examining standard fees of newly launched products relative to incumbents. So, I do want to caveat upfront that this fee summary that you see here reflects managers' standard stated fees, basically as of today, and incumbent strategies could potentially lower their fees over time to remain competitive there. So, the analysis here depicts the median universe stated fees for a $25,000,000 mandate size and the bars that you see here represent the fee range of products that were launched prior to 2021, while the diamonds you see there represent the median fees of newly launched strategies, specifically those strategies in each universe with inception dates between 2021 and '5. So, as viewers may know, we do have a significant amount of negotiated fee data available, but again, that's not reflected here. So, median stated fees for newly launched strategies are actually lower in six of the universes that you see here, as indicated by the green diamonds there. So, if we look specifically in the global equity spectrum, newly launched global Cap Core strategies are essentially in line with the broader universe there, both sitting around 65 bps, with the broader universe spanning anywhere from 30 up to 100 bps. Across both global all cap growth and large core there, we can see newer strategies in both universes actually priced lower with respect to the universe mediums there. I think interesting fee observations in The US large core and growth space, where we can see the median fees of newer strategies actually rank in the bottom quartile, perhaps suggesting pricing pressure in those perhaps more established universes there. And then lastly, across EMX China and Global Credit, again, areas, as we've touched on previously, that are experiencing a significant amount of growth. We can see the median fees of newer strategies with less established track records are actually higher in that particular space. However, you know, still relatively tight versus their respective mediums, but perhaps this suggests managers are potentially trying to command the premium pricing as compared to those incumbent managers in these more higher demand universes. Thanks so much, Russ. Always impressive to see the power of the data and analytics within the Nasdaq eVestment platform. I think highlighting this from a global cross asset perspective is really, really enlightening. Thanks for that. Gillian, let me throw this one your way. What are your thoughts from an index perspective when it comes to pricing and fees? Because you obviously don't need a track record per se for index products. And we just see so many products proliferating out there. Yeah, I think it's a good point. This is really interesting to see, especially within the SMA space. With ETFs, I think what's interesting is as we've moved more and more into active, there's been this conversation around fees. Within the ETF marketplace, lower is always going to be better. I think that's generally speaking across any vehicle. But there's those that have started off buying indexed ETFs sort of expect that all ETFs should be five or six basis points. And then you start to look at the active products that are coming to market, and they're forty, fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty basis points at times, which might be relatively competitive relative to buying it at another wrapper. But compared to the NASDAQ 100 or another large cap equity exposure, it seems very pricey. So I think as an industry, we're sort of going through this exercise of helping investors understand that what are you paying for? Price relative to what? Price relative to if you're talking about US equities, sure. But if you're buying, whether it be crypto or maybe a bad example, some of those are priced quite low as well. But generally speaking, if you're looking at some sort of multi asset strategy or you're looking at there's quasi hedge funds right now in ETFs. And so if you're talking 80 basis points versus two twenty or one in 10, it's very compelling. And so I think really helping folks understand that not all things should be priced the same within that wrapper. Just because the wrapper is the same doesn't mean the exposures are and then the price should be the same. And then also, that T stands for traded. And so ETFs are traded vehicles. And so it's not just a quoted expense ratio that matters here. And so you need to look at things like trading costs and really evaluate that when you're looking at an ETF and you're taking a peek under the hood understanding what is that total cost of ownership for you as investor? Yes, the expense ratio matters, but what is the volume and the scale tradability of that product as well? What does that look like? And so, that's really important as we think about ETF. What is that total cost of ownership as we think about that marketplace as it relates to fees? Very interesting. Thanks so much, Gillian. With that, let me turn it over to Deb. From a consultant perspective, how willing are consultants to seed a strategy, and or will consultants be willing to direct much research attention to a strategy that may have minimal assets? Yeah, there's two challenging questions there. So first one in terms of seeding consultants won't generally seed strategies, they don't have the capital to do that. But they will, as I said earlier, work with asset managers to create product that is relevant for a client. And hopefully that way, if you can get a rating, you can hopefully get dollars coming in. What may happen sometimes, and I have seen this once, where a consultant, say in Europe, has rated a strategy in The US, They like the idea of that strategy. And they've said to the manager, if you open a product, we can gather X amount of assets to invest in that strategy straight away. Obviously, we would like a small fee reduction to do that because we're seeding you in The UK. And in that way, that consultant had delegation authority over those assets, they could make that investment. I think it raises an interesting question whether if the client leaves that consultant, whether they still get a lower fee, but that's probably an admin point down the line. So there are ways around that the consultant will help get a product seeded, but they won't normally seed it specifically themselves. In terms of getting attention, I suspect most people on this call would say it's actually hard to get attention from consultants full stop. And it's many of the things we talked about earlier on. What's differentiating you? Where do you expect this to sit in the client's portfolio, etc. But one thing I would say is please don't try and just make a relationship with a consultant when you've got something to sell or you have a new product you want to do. That's an ongoing relationship building. It takes several years to make sure you've got the right relationships. And you need to have, as Julian said earlier on, you need to know exactly where your sources of potential capital are, and consultants can be one of them. The other small comment I make, it's big point, but it's a small comment, is clients are being incredibly discerning about which asset managers they are working with in terms of culture. So you need to understand what it is, is your culture. Is there a degree of making sure that that's aligned to the client? Are you putting the client first in all of this? And we saw that coming through in our research. When clients are thinking about who they want to work with with asset managers, the culture of that asset manager is very important. So there's a number of factors there. Yes, the fees are really important. Yes, the seeding is important, but you've actually really got to want to work with that asset manager as well. And so culture and building that relationship over the long run is really important. Very successful. Thank you, Deb. Really appreciate that. Julian, anything you want to add on before we wrap up in terms of seeding and pricing and that like? I mean, think Debbie's covered the seeding point and in terms of pricing, the research is out there, so it should be relatively easy to know where to land your pricing. But I will just go back to the culture point for a moment because in our research the cultural point is this a manager I can work with in terms of the internal culture and how aligned are they with the client and that's particularly important around product innovation and launches. Culture was identified amongst asset owners as being one of their key criteria for choosing managers and choosing individual products. But you know what, it was also identified by asset owners as the areas that managers were weakest at in terms of articulating their culture and what differentiated them from their competitors and that and how aligned would they with their clients in terms of their overall investment management skills but in relation to products and new product launches in particular. So if managers can get the articulation of their culture right and the alignment of their interests with clients right, then it's an easy win versus their competitors because our own proprieties suggest managers are not very good at doing that at the moment. That's great. One last point, which I think will support you as well. So if you're going to launch a new strategy, please put it on eVestment or wherever you're to put it. Because in my experience, when I was at Mercer, we had clients where we had quarterly calls, and they would like to screen the universes before they spoke to us what's new. And if they think something looks interesting, they can put a little bit of pressure on their consultant to try and get it researched. By putting it there, putting it out there, it should help in terms of profile. We love to hear that, Deb. Absolutely, Russ. I'm not guaranteeing anything comes from it, but if your client says, I've seen that this has been launched, so I think that helps a little bit. Thank you, Deb. And for our audience, I promise we didn't tee her up for that. We appreciate the support. We'll take it on that. But, Julian, I think your point is it's a great one on which to finish, right? It's the culture and the relationships, right? Which is still so important in so many aspects of the whole kind of product game, if you will, at the end of the day. Well, this has been a great, great panel. I wish we could go on for another hour, but we're right at time. So we appreciate everybody staying with us. It was such a well rounded panel and incredible insights from our friends at JPEGs for a third party perspective. Also wanted to thank Russ and Jillian and Craig from NASDAQ specifically for for all the insights and and Deb and Julian, thank you again. Really covered a broad constellation here in terms of product dynamics across public and private markets and alternative space. And if, people in the audience have any sort of follow ups, have emails up. Please don't hesitate to reach out via these emails or to your NASDAQ representative directly. Also please contact JPEG as well for any further, follow-up questions as well. So with that, thank you all so much for attending, and we look forward to seeing you again soon.