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What key trends have you witnessed in 2017?
Hiring in the investment management space overall has been subdued versus the 2012-2016 period, despite record stock market highs and perceptions of overinflated equity prices. This resulted in less senior hires, but an increase in contractors and a clamping down on expensive events over a preference for webinars and e-marketing.
Whilst the effects of Brexit have been more pronounced in banking, we expect that future regulatory agreements concerning potential equivalence, fund domiciles and the necessity for delegation, labour movement, capital movement and tariffs and on distribution through the AIFMD marketing passport, will shape the market toward and beyond 2020.
Finally MiFID II, which everyone seems not to be looking forward to, has been an ongoing topic across all asset managers and one we expect to hear more about as the complexities become a reality.
What key trends do you expect to see over the next 12 months?
E- and m-commerce-led marketing experience will start to become the norm. We have already seen this with challenger banks, consumer-led fintech firms and in proptech, and the time is nigh for investment management firms to face the need to change their approach and for marketers to consider the skills they have to stand out. The conflict here will be around regulatory and product knowledge and whether everyone in the marketing department needs to be an expert on these in order to influence the fund managers, analysts, lawyers and researchers elsewhere in the organisation.
Senior marketers may continue to struggle to relocate if up-and-coming asset managers do not invest in marketing. Firms in the ESG and PE/VC spaces have been investing in their brands, but a large group of marketers with 15 or more years’ experience with buy-side firms exists and they cannot all work for the trendier managers. As such, we have recommended exploring contracting as an option as well as moves to professional services and fintech firms, all of which we have helped marketers develop this year.
Data and automation will continue to be important for hyper-personalisation, operational efficiency and cost saving. We have seen more of these roles this year than ever before, including data scientists and see no reason for it to stop as firms are able to gather and analyse more data about investors.
Finally, following the ESG and cost transparency trends I expect brand development and management roles to become more on trend. Brand ethics, values and purpose are very much central to marketing and businesses’ ability to establish trust and voice. We therefore expect opportunities for agencies to assist with rebrand and client-side marketers to have opportunities to lead and advise on brand and customer insight in the longer term.
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Do you anticipate any changes to permanent salaries and bonuses over the next 12 months?
The fight for sector experience may lead to a redesign of reward packages; established IM marketers can command good salaries and this could lead to sharp increases for those that can fulfil niche or senior marketing leadership roles.
Contract roles & day rates
Investment management firms have proven to be regular hirers of interim candidates particularly in smaller firms. A noticeable need was support marketing roles to heads of marketing and other senior marketers.
The decreased risk of hiring on an interim basis to these firms is attractive given general uncertainty in financial services from Brexit and we would expect these trends to continue in 2018.
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