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Navigating the Investment Landscape: A Leadership Lens on 2024

With the investment landscape at a pivot point, this article explores some of the trends that are likely to drive decision-making by CEOs and investment firm leaders in the coming year. Weathering the uncertainty of the more complex macroeconomic and political panorama that lies ahead may depend on getting smart about the “knowledge that matters” and shoring up talent in key areas.

Key drivers for 2024: CEOs identify a complex interplay of macro-level factors driving the year ahead. Buoyed by an initial uptick in activity, most investment firm leaders express a cautious optimism in forecasting the coming months, albeit one tempered by concerns of lingering recession risk and the legacy of last year’s interest rate spikes. Few are willing to call the year’s most influential elections with any certainty; others worry that China’s fiscal stimulus may be insufficient to prompt a global reset. Moving cash back into play will help boost growth, most believe, but the intensity of the search for scale will continue to drive aggregation and consolidation in asset management. Significant downside risks include potential for a major fallout in the U.S. job market which then feeds through into a more marked consumer-side slowdown.

Adjusting investment strategies: As the investment landscape pivots towards this more volatile and challenging future, investment firms are likely to dispense entirely with passive investment strategies and gravitate naturally towards active strategies. Acquiring knowledge – not just information or data but “the right kind of knowledge,” as investment firm leaders emphasise – will be key to understanding and mitigating risks. Being informed on cutting-edge issues like AI and having an ability to identify telling details amid the obfuscation of election-driven political noise will be vital not only to keep one’s own organisation on target but also in providing useful value-add when educating clients.

The talent imperative: The successful organisations of tomorrow are those that crack the talent question and solve the challenge of sourcing the right people to drive their organisations forward. Strategic hiring is an important tool allowing organisations to build their brands and affirm their values, making recruitment a process that merits oversight at CEO level. Across the industry, technology and ESG will remain the most competitive fields for attracting and retaining high-level expertise, but individual asset managers should identify mission-critical aspects within their operations and prioritise the talent search on those areas.

Shifting generational dynamics: Many organisations still prefer to recruit older, more experienced individuals, but hiring among the younger generations provides an opportunity to grow talent in-house. Older executives may mistrust what they see as the caprices of the millennials, but the twentysomething generation offers digital fluency, adaptability and – based at least on widespread anecdotal evidence – a preference for the office environment over remote working. Cultural change is already transforming the asset management industry, as the diversity of cultures, languages and life experiences possessed by today’s employees ushers in new outlooks at even the most traditional of organisations.

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