Fit for the future of asset and wealth management

In PwC’s Asset and Wealth Management Revolution 2025, we identified four winning business model archetypes that are set to capture a significant share of the projected US$230 billion increase in industry revenues by 2030. Players with these characteristics have a decisive edge in a sector undergoing rapid transformation due to technology, shifting investor expectations, and the growth of private markets to serve retail investors. Greater scale or assets under management (AUM) alone no longer guarantee success. What matters is strategic clarity and consistent alignment behind it.

Building on that analysis, we conducted a new global survey of 264 asset and wealth managers and distributors to assess how firms are positioning themselves against this changing landscape. Using strategic rather than financial metrics as key indicators, we evaluated firms across two dimensions:

1. Execution capability demonstrating high-potential performance
2. Strategic clarity through alignment to the four business model archetypes

Encouragingly, just over half show strength on at least one of these dimensions. But only about one in ten combine both.

Many asset and wealth managers sit somewhere in between. Some have clarified their strategic direction but haven’t yet built the capabilities to support it. Others demonstrate strong execution mometum but have yet to fully consolidate around a winning business model. The challenge for companies—and the big opportunity—is to align clarity and capability.  

Together, the two dimensions of high-potential performance and clarity of business model provide a forward-looking view of how firms are positioning themselves as industry transformation accelerates.

Dimension 1: High-potential performance

The high-potential performance dimension focuses on execution capability over the next five years. First, we assessed firms across three leading indicators: speed to market, innovation intensity, and strategic agility.
 

We classified firms at the top end of the distribution across these measures as high-potential performers, representing the top 20% of our sample.

These firms aren’t defined by size or geography. What differentiates them is operational momentum. They launch faster. They scale decisively. And they reallocate capital away from products that no longer support their priorities. That discipline is becoming a competitive advantage in its own right. 

A common pattern among leading firms is a shift away from traditional fund launch cycles towards modular product development. Rather than building new multi-asset strategies from scratch each time, they standardise internal building blocks, such as equity, fixed income, and alternatives, and recombine them into solutions tailored to specific investor needs.

Other examples of differentiation include a large multi-asset manager that has combined scale in index and active strategies with an expanding private markets platform. Rather than relying primarily on standalone funds, it increasingly distributes its products through model portfolios and managed accounts, often in partnership with major wealth platforms. Data and technology support more personalised portfolio construction at scale, strengthening relevance within advisor-led channels.

Dimension 2: Strategic clarity

Execution capability can’t guarantee future-fit viability on its own. Our second dimension focuses on business model choice and clarity of competitive intent.

In Asset and Wealth Management Revolution 2025, we identified four business model archetypes positioned to capture a significant share of the projected $230 billion increase in industry revenues by 2030. In our latest survey, 42% of firms clearly align with one of these archetypes, based on a majority match across customer segments, competitive positioning, and investment focus. 
 

Our research highlights how this strategic clarity translates into measurable advantages. Archetype-aligned firms are:

• 1.6 times more likely to prioritise product distribution strategy, reflecting a clearer understanding of how control of client access, data, and ecosystem relationships is reshaping competition
• Stronger in areas that are becoming central to competitiveness, which includes being 2.3 times more likely to adopt hyper-personalisation, as well as AI, automation, and data to tailor portfolios and servicing
• 1.9 times more likely to be alert to non-adjacent threats, including big tech, fintech, and platform providers that can sit between manufacturers and end investors
• 1.5 times more likely to link strategy to demographic shifts such as ageing populations, wealth transfer, and pension funding pressures

More than half of respondent firms (52%) demonstrate strength in at least one of these dimensions. When we bring the dimensions together in the chart below, we get an even better sense of what firms are missing and how they can become fully future-fit.
 

Our insights show:

Nearly a third of survey respondents (32%) align clearly to a winning archetype but don’t sit within the top tier of firms with high-potential performance. These firms have chosen a direction—whether towards scale, solutions, or specialisation—but haven’t yet adjusted their operating models to support it. Legacy product offerings, established distribution relationships, and tying capital to existing lines of business can slow reallocation.  

Nearly one in ten (9%) demonstrate strong performance momentum but aren’t well aligned to a defined archetype. Many in this group match several archetype attributes but have yet to mobilise around a dominant model. Here, the issue is less about capability and more around prioritisation. Without clearer concentration of capital and leadership attention, execution strength can lose focus.

The standout 11%—the future-fit firms—combine clear archetype alignment with high-potential performance. They’re clear about the role they play in the ecosystem, whether the focus is on owning the client interface, shaping allocation frameworks, or supplying essential building blocks. Their operating models reflect that clarity.  

The remaining 48% demonstrate neither strong alignment to an archetype nor momentum towards high-potential performance. This group could steadily lose ground. A continued reliance on historic strengths may prove insufficient if investments in technology, data capability, and operating infrastructure fail to keep pace with their peers. 

What are some of the future-fit firms doing to successfully combine a winning business model with investments in the capabilities needed to execute?

Examples include a solutions-oriented firm embedded deep within advisor platforms that no longer competes primarily on individual fund performance. Instead, it standardises due diligence, governance, and portfolio construction so advisors can deliver consistent outcomes at scale. Its products are designed to fit into models and managed accounts, making them harder to displace even when competitors offer lower headline fees.

One low-cost manufacturer, meanwhile, has developed its ability to concentrate resources without compromising experience or performance in a margin-compressed environment. The firm has invested in scale, liquidity, and operational efficiency, securing default placement in third-party models and retirement plans. The payoff: durable, repeatable, and profitable earnings.

The decisions and capabilities of this future-fit group—in where they pursue growth, how they transform their operating models, and how they compete and collaborate—signal key ways of securing competitive advantage over the next five years. These include:

1. Adapting strategies to capture new sources of profitable growth and value creation. As we can see in the chart below, high-net-worth and institutional segments remain important sources of growth. This is consistent with projected expansion among sovereign wealth funds (with a compound annual growth rate of 6.6%, according to PwC’s Asset and Wealth Management Revolution 2025) and high-net-worth individuals (6.5% CAGR) that’s being driven by demand for co-investment, private market access, and tailored portfolio solutions.

Leading firms are also shifting sharply towards growth in the retail and mass-affluent segments as they look to capture projected CAGR of 5.7% by pursuing scalable, digital-first distribution and solution-oriented offerings. In fact, future-fit firms are 1.8 times more likely than all other respondents to identify retail and mass-affluent investors as a primary revenue driver over the next five years. They’re also 1.5 times more likely to prioritise third-party distribution platforms alongside a shift to more democratised investor access.
 

The underlying decision isn’t simply to embrace the ‘retailisation’ trend but to decide what kinds of products and solutions work best in these channels and which growth formats truly scale. At the same time, these future-fit firms recognise the importance of determining which legacy activities should no longer compete for capital and management attention. Retail distribution can expand reach, but it also raises reporting, control, and servicing demands, often pushing break-even thresholds higher unless firms redesign operating models accordingly.

As they look to cement their position in the retail market, many firms are looking to strengthen their presence within models, managed accounts, and solution sleeves that can be embedded in advisor platforms. Some firms have responded by narrowing their retail product sets while focusing investment on a small number of strategies that work well across models and channels. Others have shifted private-market capabilities into semi-liquid or interval structures to access capital.

2. Making the most of transformation and technological adoption. Technology creates advantage when it changes how decisions are made and work is done. Leading firms are embedding transformative technologies—such as agentic AI, tokenisation, advanced analytics, and operational intelligence—into the core of investment, distribution, and servicing to shape decisions and execution rather than simply support them. These firms are significantly more likely to view disruptive technologies as a primary driver of growth over the next five years.

Not every firm can pursue adoption of key technologies, such as AI, at the same pace. Meaningful integration requires investment capacity, technical expertise, high-quality data, and access to specialist capabilities. But leading firms are applying AI to core processes, such as deal screening, in which machine-learning models analyse pipeline opportunities, uncover risk signals, and effectively act as a non-voting participant in an investment committee.

Future-fit firms are also 1.8 times more likely, as the chart below indicates, to automate product or portfolio hyper-personalisation over the next five years. A separate piece of analysis of our survey results shows that, compared to all others, future-fit firms are 2.6 times more likely to invest in business support functions. And they’re almost twice as likely to prioritise value-chain dynamics by taking actions such as rewiring workflows, governance, and decision rights across the full investment and servicing life cycle.
 

Future-fit performers are increasingly deploying automation to portfolio life-cycle management, real-time monitoring, and personalisation. These areas directly shape client experience and operating leverage. Our market observations show that some firms have reorganised teams around end-to-end portfolio journeys rather than functions, while others have simplified product architectures to provide personalisation by adjusting allocation dials rather than creating new products.

3. Embracing collaboration in a changing competitive landscape. Future-fit firms increasingly recognise that competition is no longer confined to asset and wealth manager peers but extends to platforms, data providers, and non-adjacent entrants that shape client access and allocation decisions. 

Future-fit firms are 1.4 times more likely to identify platforms collaborating with incumbents as a competitive force. They’re also 1.9 times more likely to see non-adjacent entrants, such as large technology firms, telecommunications companies, and high-end retailers, as a source of disruption. Future-fit firms tend to focus less on who manufactures products and more on who controls client access, data flows, and allocation decisions. 

The blind spot lies in underestimating where power is shifting. Firms that continue to define competition narrowly are at risk of overlooking the platforms and ecosystems that increasingly determine capital flows. By pursuing automation and data initiatives in isolation, these firms risk discovering too late that competitive advantage has shifted elsewhere.
 

As automation and data capabilities increasingly rely on shared platforms and ecosystems, advantage is shaped by integration and orchestration. Future-fit firms are 1.3 times more likely to collaborate on acess to advanced technologies and operational data. 

In practice, this often means embedding proprietary investment capabilities into broader ecosystems, rather than attempting to control every market interface, including advisor platforms, model marketplaces, and outsourced chief investment officer environments.

Some organisations are collaborating in areas such as AI adoption. One midsized pension investor, serving several hundred thousand members and managing tens of billions of dollars in assets, recognised that its internal AI capabilities were insufficient to keep pace with the market. Rather than attempting to build everything in-house, it partnered to accelerate its AI journey by developing a business case, a road map, and a responsible AI framework, as well as launching early prototypes.

Wherever your firm stands today, becoming more future-fit depends on successfully combining strategic clarity with strong execution capability. The following no-regret decisions can help firms build both:

1. Determine your archetype. Be clear about where and how your firm intends to compete. The four strategic archetypes (full-spectrum hypermarket, solutions platform, low-cost manufacturer, niche champion) describe distinct ways of competing. In practice, the right answer may not be a single archetype. Some firms will combine different elements by, for example, pairing a scalable manufacturing capability with a focused solutions offering, while others may be constrained by their market position or geography.

The critical decision is to define where you can succeed and want to play. You can then align capital allocation, talent strategy, product development, and collaborative partnerships and alliances to support the business model. At the same time, it’s important to stop funding initiatives that don’t support your new model.

2. Invest in the right human capital. Equip your workforce for a future shaped by retailisation, collaboration, and hyper-personalisation. Priorities include targeted reskilling and upskilling to build a more agile, innovation-driven, tech-savvy, and data-centric talent base comprised of professionals such as data engineers, digital product managers, and analytics specialists.

These are no longer support roles but instead need to be at the forefront of your market-facing capabilities. You also need the right sales and investor relations talent. For example, selling to consultants and advisors of savings plans held by individual investors doesn’t involve the same set of expertise as engaging with large institutions or high-net-worth clients.

It’s important to adopt an approach of active strategic workforce management to rebalance the talent mix by making deliberate trade-offs, reshaping roles, and reinventing recruitment processes to prioritise fewer, high-impact skill sets. Combined with agile, cross-functional teams, this capability accelerates innovation and reduces time-to-market.

3. Gear up for continuous transformation. The unrelenting pace of change in technology and investor demands means that transformation needs to be a continuous process rather than a periodic lift and shift of your systems. The trends towards AI and tokenisation are gathering momentum. The impact of the next big leaps in areas such as quantum computing looms on the horizon. Delays in adoption could see your organisation fall behind.

If you can’t develop the necessary tech capabilities or bring in talent at speed, form partnerships and alliances or consider managed services. Make sure these collaborations include clear performance metrics, shared objectives, and robust governance frameworks to avoid ineffective alliances. It’s important to treat ecosystem collaboration as a core growth enabler.

Delegate non-core functions—such as fund administration and quality assurance—to specialised providers under outcome-based service agreements. Maintain control over relationships, intellectual property, and strategic activities in-house. Rely on outsourcing to better manage costs, access technology, and improve productivity without compromising strategic control. 

4. Execute targeted M&A. Use mergers and acquisitions to acquire capabilities that strengthen your chosen archetype. Prioritise targets in areas such as digital asset platforms, product strategy and expansion, private market origination, and distribution networks. Integration plans must safeguard client experience, harmonise data models, and eliminate operational redundancies. 

5. Measure your progress to drive results for your stakeholders. Implement a measurement framework to monitor transformation progress. Key indicators should include metrics that provide transparency and ensure transformation efforts deliver tangible results to investors and other stakeholders. These include:

• Time-to-launch for new products and services
• Percentage of client journeys personalised
• Proportion of the workforce reskilled for digital capabilities
• Innovation achieved through partnerships and alliances  
   

This article reflects the insights and contributions of the following PwC partners: Albertha Charles (editorial board chair), Maja Baiocco, Matthew Blumenfeld, Peter Brewin, Declan Byrne, Roland Kastoun, Barry Knee, Steven Libby, Andy O’Callaghan, Paul Pak, Andrew Thorne, Joseph Wiggins, and Dariush Yazdani.