Better Connected 2025: Building the platform for the future of investment

FE fundinfo’s Better Connected events aim to bring the investment industry together and thereby mirror the capabilities of its integrated platform, Nexus. 

Investment managers and wealth managers from across the fund landscape have for too long operated discretely rather than as two sides of the same flywheel.  

The result is a fragmented industry with disparate data points, unstandardised data management practices, faltering progress through digital transformation, and a heightened focus on wrangling all of the above into regulatory compliance.  

Consolidating data into a golden source of truth, connecting each stage of the value chain for greater collaboration and faster time-to-market, and simplifying processes to maximise time and resource efficiency drive at the heart of our shared goals: more time spent focusing on client outcomes and, by extension, maximised client success. 

Better Connected sets the stage for a new, integrated future of investments by bringing both sides of the investment community together and showcasing the value of a platform covering everything from fund manufacturing to distribution. 

The 2025 stop in London featured in-depth analysis of trends from across the space, feature-rich demos of Nexus’s capabilities, and lively discussions around AI and where stakeholders across the industry can use it to unlock value.  

An industry at a crossroads 

Along with market consolidation, generational wealth transfer and the upswell of interest in AI and its capacity to connect disparate data, both sides of the investment community must rapidly align to fresh regulatory expectations across global jurisdictions. 

Liam Healy, FE fundinfo’s CEO, noted in his opening address that the industry is at a crossroads of significant change driven by market trends and various pressures. 

"In a market like the UK you can see an incredible amount of assets changing hands. PwC has forecasted that the investment management community could also consolidate by up to 20% by 2030, putting even more pressure on businesses,” he said.  

“All of this comes in parallel with the rapid emergence of new technology offering significant opportunities along with implementation challenges." 

The key takeaway was the consolidation of these pressures, client expectations and the opportunities presented by emergent tech via one end-to-end platform: Nexus. 

“When you look at the assets under the FE fundinfo consolidated group, with FE Analytics, Trustnet, FE CashCalc, FE AdviserAsset, and most recently Contengo among many others, it really is an incredibly powerful flywheel,” Liam enthused.  

“What became evident to us was that we sit on all this data, and so we have both sides of the flywheel. It creates a unique superpower whereby we can ingest, capture, structure and manage an incredible amount of information.” 

The power of integrated data 

Taking the stage next was Adam Graham, FE fundinfo’s Global Head of Product, who distilled the challenge of disparate data management with an analogy to which we can all relate: 

"When you move house, you change one piece of information about yourself, your address, and how many people do you need to tell about that change?” Adam posited.  

“Have I told the bank? Have I told the kids' school? Have I told the pension provider? Imagine doing that every day, 10 times a day, hundreds of times a month, as we do in our industry."  

In the investment industry, where every stakeholder in the value chain is beholden to reporting, regulatory, and accuracy pressures that can make or break the end result for clients, this challenge is particularly pressing. Simple errors from regular re-keying can have serious ramifications, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. It’s by no means a niche issue, either. 

Of those surveyed by FE fundinfo, 56% of asset managers cited siloed systems as a key pain point. On the wealth management side, 81% of financial advisers said they regularly battle with fragmented technology. 

"It might be changing a share class, for example, where you change the share cost,” Adam explained. “If systems aren't connected, it's painful, it takes time, it causes friction and there's risk in the market. If you could take that risk away, and connect all those systems together, imagine all the time you would save by not having to go out to each one."  

That, Adam says, is the beating heart of Nexus: data mastering that eliminates swathes of risks for human error and missed data entries, provides a golden source of truth for users across the value chain, and leverages data to empower process efficiencies to ultimately maximise client value. 

While Nexus already offers a robust platform that acts as the connective tissue between manufacturing and distribution, it’s only growing more powerful. 

“We've now released our first agentic offering,” Adam said. “With every piece of information that you share whilst talking to a client, Nexus extracts that data, pushes it into your CRM ultimately saving all that double-keying time. Agents sit on the back of it all to run reports, create your emails, and enable you to focus on the client. It recoups time, whether to take on more customers or play more golf."

Thoughtful AI engagement 

Meeting Agent, with its auto-transcription and CRM population capabilities already proving its value for IFAs, is just one string to the Nexus AI bow. Better Connected guests visiting the Experience Zone between talks and panels will also have seen the AI-powered Document Inspector which serves asset manager clients by validating regulatory documents against swathes of frameworks, including over 600 UK CCI rules alone. 

The platform’s smart notifications also ensure all stakeholders are aware of a project’s progress and their required actions at the point of need, tying the end-to-end process without the need for email nudges or picking up lost threads. 

"There are certain things that, whether we want to do them or not, should no longer be done by humans,” said Liam in his opening address. “There are better ways to do them that will lift the productivity of our businesses up." Nexus AI is already showcasing what that looks like in the investment space, but there are far more use cases waiting to be leapt upon. 

Through 2026, FE fundinfo’s continued investment in AI will expand Nexus’s agentic capabilities, provide further assurance of closed data environments to maximise privacy and security, and enable data modelling within those environments.  

As Adam mentioned, the team at FE fundinfo is excited to continue bringing clients into these projects and thereby ensure that technological development is always closely tied to customer needs. 

"Your ideas can come to life that much more quickly,” said Adam. “We work hard to get connections across the industry and work with colleagues, share feedback." 

Exploring a new frontier 

Also introduced at Better Connected London was FE fundinfo’s newly-appointed Head of Private Markets, Maryam Longrus.  

With 20 years’ experience in financial services and a specialisation in tech enablement, Maryam has the exciting challenge of opening the robust capabilities of Nexus to private markets. As portfolio diversification gathers pace, private markets’ importance to our clients has never been more profound.  

Despite their distinction from public markets, Maryam highlighted the similar challenges facing the space. Those include: data trapped in PDFs or on paper, unstructured data stymying AI’s potential, limited infrastructure for wealth channels to reach private markets, and hybridisation of public and private structures creating fresh challenges in the back-office. 

Connecting manufacturing to distribution, enabling data mastering and access to a golden source of truth, and democratising access to wealth channels via integrated investment platforms stands to unlock considerable value for private investors. 

The case for connected intelligence 

By bringing together clients from across the asset management and wealth management spectrum, Better Connected London 2025 was a showcase of FE fundinfo’s vision for an integrated, end-to-end approach in the world of investments.  

The company’s client-focused approach to platform development, forward-looking mentality and laser-focus on delivering value across myriad pain points was on full display.  

While FE fundinfo is rightly proud of its achievements with Nexus and working to set the new standard for how the industry operates, the calls for collaboration and retained focus on mastered fundamentals spoke to the momentum driving further development and greater value to be unlocked for clients through 2026 and beyond.