Fund centres are a staple of fund manager websites. They’ve been shoehorned/embedded/integrated into websites for many years with varying levels of sophistication and experience. Mostly poorly in my opinion. Why?
Fund centres are typically:
- not integrated into the Content Management System (CMS) – so not connected to other content, modules or even analytics
- loaded separately to the rest of the page – so an empty page loads while you watch a spinner until the fund centre loads
- re-using your own data – not always of course but the irony of sending data you already hold to a 3rd party to play it back to you in a fund centre
- generic – serving the same fund centre experience (with some content filtered) to very different audiences (separate post on this)
- expensive – alongside CX this feels like such a strong trigger right now; with operating budgets (rightly) under pressure, spending large sums on subscriptions for a fund centre is flawed
- one trick pony’s – most fund centres are purely built for a public website. Portals, intranets, extranets, platforms all need separate solutions. This is 100% wrong
The biggest drivers for change are firms improving their data models and needing to reduce operational costs.
As firms have better internal data solutions (eg. Fundipedia or completely internal) there is less need for an expensive subscription to manage the data – just an API in front of your data to run your fund centre (and any other endpoint) and a great front end experience for clients.
As the FCA drives the CCI framework and Consumer Duty responsibilities taking a flexible approach to how data & content is delivered to different audiences and channels is increasingly important.
It doesn’t have to be expensive.
Perhaps that’s the biggest change.