This week sees the release of a major new report from this news service and Advent Software, on the issues of operational trends in wealth management.

This week sees the release of the 2015 Technology and Operations Trends in Wealth Management Report from WealthBriefing and Advent Software, a business unit of SS&C. Here is a summary of some of its main themes and a link to download the full report.

The 2015 Technology and Operations Trends in Wealth Management Report has now been officially launched, highlighting the biggest challenges facing institutions today, the strategies they are focusing on to combat them and the key drivers that are changing approaches. As might be predicted, finding new ways to deal with the ever-increasing compliance burden and the need for greater innovation in areas such as mobile and data management were top of the agenda.

A useful preface to this year’s headline findings is that two-thirds of the wealth management professionals surveyed see the pace and impact of regulatory change rising even higher in the next three years. And, against this backdrop, it comes as little surprise that three-quarters of respondents believe that technology is playing a crucial role in helping their organisation meet its regulatory obligations.

Strikingly, however, over nine in ten wealth managers believe that technology could play an ever greater role in helping firms cope with compliance – and it is the shifting strategies firms are deploying to meet this and other industry pressures which form the real substance of this report.

Proponents of the possibilities represented by cloud computing, hosted technologies and outsourcing generally will find very encouraging signs of wider acceptance across the industry. Some 77 per cent of respondents foresee an increase in their firm’s use of cloud technology over the next three years (2014: 62 per cent), with 12 per cent now predicting a significant increase. Meanwhile, 64 per cent of respondents say their firm is very much open to outsourced technology and 63 per cent expect their firm’s spend on external hosting/software to increase in the next three years.

Barriers to adopting these new ways of working still naturally exist, the report confirms. Yet these have been shown to be weakening significantly over time as institutions (not to mention regulators) become more comfortable with the security and business continuity safeguards that can be put in place with options like using cloud technology or BPO. All the while, drivers of adoption - like the almost universal need for far greater, and yet still cost-effective IT resourcing – are clearly opening minds. The fact that enhanced data management was found to be a priority for over eight in ten institutions and yet they were given mixed reviews on how they are actually performing on this front seems to signal a need for better storage and processing power going forward at the very least.

Also key among this year’s findings was a big jump in the proportion of respondents saying that their firm needs multiple technology providers to meet its needs (rising to a third in 2015 from a quarter last year). This, combined with over half saying their firm’s more innovative IT investments have been held back by the compliance maelstrom, underscores just how important a role vendors themselves will have in helping institutions finding the right mixture of solutions for their needs going forwards – technology connectivity and industry collaboration featuring as key themes running through this study.

Access to the 2015 Technology and Operations Trends in Wealth Management Report is free to members of the WealthBriefing network. To download your copy click here.

The report was also the subject of a 21 September Share Radio interview with Daniel Eriksson, VP of solutions consulting at Advent Software. To listen to the segment, click here.