About the Report

Retail and institutional sales teams should join forces to use data to better drive sales, a new report from Ignites Research in partnership with The SME Forum suggests.

Though fund shops’ data analytics capabilities have gotten stronger in recent years, gaps remain between the retail and institutional sides of distribution, according to a new report from Ignites Research.  The paper, “The New Urgency for Data-Driven Sales,” is based on surveys of heads of data analytics and business intelligence at 26 firms conducted with SME Forum. (link will take you to Ignites in a new browser.  Subscription required to view full report)

“Too often companies still see retail and institutional as such separate silos that they may overlook opportunities for drawing lessons between the two,” says Loren Fox, Director of Ignites Research, who authored the report.  Mr. Fox further suggests in the report that forcing retail and institutional sales team to share data and resources can help each side improve its analytics efforts.

Coordinating data analytics initiatives across channels could also help both teams become more efficient, Fox says. However, retail and institutional sales teams often use different data, Fox notes, and they may approach each channel differently. “Knowing how to approach RIAs is not going to help you necessarily in how you approach endowments,” he says. Some of the granular data available for financial advisors, like broker-dealer data packs, isn’t available on the institutional side, the report notes. And the use of technology data in institutional sales tends to lag the retail space.

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