2024 London Fall SME Forum Roundtable
T Rowe Price London Headquarters
November 21, 2024
Autumn in London is like a painting brought to life.
This inaugural Global Roundtable will cover a range of key topics proposed by our membership, fostering valuable discussions and insights. The SME Forum has served the asset management community in the UK, Europe, and beyond since being invited by our U.S. members to expand globally over a decade ago. From an initial dozen participants to over 60 at this year’s Global Forum in London, the SME Forum has played an increasingly vital role in connecting asset management practitioners worldwide.
Following this year’s Global Forum, participants expressed a strong desire to build this community beyond an annual gathering. In response, the SME Forum is pleased to support this effort and invites all potential asset management participants to contribute their input and insights.
To ensure meaningful exchanges that deepen our understanding of the topics at hand, we highly value your input on both strategic and real-world implementation factors. Your participation is essential, and we appreciate your involvement in shaping these discussions.
Venue
T. Rowe Price – London
Warwick Court, 5 Paternoster Square
London, EC4M 7DX United Kingdom
Programme
1:00 – 1:30 PM Arrivals and Welcome in London
1:30 PM GMT/ 8:30 AM ET Start Meeting In Person and Online for all Participants
1:40-2:15 PM
Leveraging CRM platforms
- What are others doing to understand how useable and relevant their CRM platforms are?
- How do we measure ourselves vs our competitors, considering usability and efficiency?
- How do you get your wholesalers to input great notes? Anyone using activity/meeting summary capture tools (could be AI, could not) to do so?
- Specifically, when wholesalers are on-the-road – what’s the best way to enable great activity and note capture?
- Does your sales team use the sales funnel in their CRM? If so, how did you drive adoption of that? How does leadership leverage/optimize the sales funnel insights?
- For my peers – What’s next in your CRM maturity roadmap? What value are you trying to drive?
- Related to AI – what’s the future of the CRM in an AI-dominated world? Does it just structure data? Is the sales team directly interacting with the CRM anymore?
- How have you approached change management with Wholesalers? Best practices? Frameworks?
- Non-data-driven wholesalers – It’s a persona I’ve encountered. How do you reach out to this wholesaler? How do you get them to entertain new ways of doing business?
2:15 – 3:00 PM
Adopting AI capabilities
- Leveraging third party versus home-grown AI solutions
- Salesforce and Microsoft promise to solve for all AI use cases, but when is a boutique provider more appropriate?
- How are you comparing vendors and thinking about integration?
- Where do you focus internal analytics efforts versus leveraging an AI vendor?
- How do you evaluate an AI vendor?
Break 3:00 – 3:15 PM
3:15 – 4:00 PM
Driving reporting and analytics
- Having a product that would marry external industry data with internal data to create actionable intelligence would be very helpful for sales people. For example, something that would blend our CRM system with With Intelligence, MandateWire to flag new searches that fit our mandate.
- How do customers feel about recorded conversations? Common sense is they don’t like it, but will this change with the rise of AI? I expect more and more financial advisors are using AI note taking with their own customers
- Other than activity and meeting summarization, what else does the org get out of it – anyone have experience getting coaching insights from meeting recordings and transcriptions?
4:00 – 4:20 PM
Integrating 3rd party services and subscriptions
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- What are some reliable data source outside major markets like US, North America… difficult to screen investors in Southern EU or Middle East for example – is someone working on this?
- Tools to pre-screen opportunities to get a faster read in the industry
4:20 – 4:50 PM
Enabling marketing and communications
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- Tactics to attract clients – how to come up with relevant content for investors while minimising internal resources
- How do you get agreement on what a good lead is
- How do you get commitment that Sales will follow up on a Marketing-led lead
- Any frameworks for coordinating Head office versus Wholesaler-led marketing?
4:50 -5:00 PM Wrap up and next steps
5:00 PM All are welcome to hosted reception by the SME Forum and Fundamental Media/Alphix downstairs at Happenstance
7:00 PM Dinner
Speakers Include:
Hazem Gamal
The SME Forum, COO
In 2018 Hazem took over the SME Forum and focuses most of his efforts there. Since its founding more than 15 years ago, The Forum has been a growing dynamic community of practitioners from the Asset Management industry who have roles in supporting the Sales, Marketing, Operations and Technology departments of their respective organizations. The deep degrees of trust in sharing best practices, avoiding pitfalls, and learning from one another are hallmarks of how valuable this community continues to be for each firm and the individual employees.
As one of the original members, he has been a continual driver of the Forum’s growth and maturity since its inception in 2003. Initially the senior representative for OppenheimerFunds, he grew to be a leader in the development of the CRM Forum, providing guidance, mentorship, facilitation and participation in various aspect of the organization’s events over the years. Hazem took over ownership and primary responsibilities for running the organization in 2018. He also continues to provide consulting services to the industry under his Thoth Advisory Services organization.
Prior to the Forum, Hazem spent more than fifteen years at OppenheimerFunds in several different roles, always as a proven change agent to help define and implement appropriate and necessary improvements to propel the business. He worked most closely with the sales and marketing divisions directing their technology needs and adoption, onboarding third-party services, in addition to portfolios such as data management, reporting and analytics, business continuity and disaster recovery, among other responsibilities.
Event Sponsor
Alphix Solutions
Alphix Solutions is the marketing technology arm of Fundamental Group. Specifically developed for the investment management industry, Alphix Solutions is an award-winning marketing intelligence suite that combines unparalleled sector-specific data with true transparency and rapid AI-powered activation.
Alphix Solutions
Learn More: https://alphix.com/
part of Fundamental Media Group: www.fundamentalgroup.com