“Asia will be the world’s largest growth market for investment professionals over the next decade,” concludes the report by the industry association.
Based on research from Mercer, the report found that India is projected to have the biggest 10-year growth of investment professionals at 33%, followed by Indonesia at 29%. China and Australia are also expected to see substantial growth, at 26% and 19% respectively.
“China will experience multinationals establishing foreign majority-owned asset management firms and large international asset managers forming wholly-owned subsidiaries. India, because of the increasing demand for financial services, its strong economic growth, and its number of capable engineers, could become the world’s investment hub,” argued the authors of Investment Professional of the Future.
“The region’s quickness to embrace financial technology, growing financial markets, and burgeoning talent pool make [Asia] well positioned to become the centre of a transforming industry,” according to the report.
The research included a global survey of 3,832 CFA Institute members and candidates about their expectations, as well as 133 industry leaders on current and future trends.
AI job threat
However, despite their confidence in the expansion of the asset management industry in the region, 43% of Asia respondents believed that their roles will be “substantially different, or not to exist at all, within five-to-10 years’ time”, due to the increasing application of artificial intelligence and other new technologies.
Among the most vulnerable jobs are accountants, auditors, analysts and sales agents.
“Technological disruption is certainly a driving force of the accelerating change in the investment industry. As financial professionals, we must learn to leverage disruption, technological or otherwise, so that we can clearly establish our purpose and our value to our clients,” said Nick Pollard, the CFA’s managing director of Asia-Pacific, in a statement.
Possession of so-called T-shaped skills – basically combining specialist expertise with a generalist capability – will be needed for success as an investment professional, with 49% of survey respondents stressing their importance. Next came leadership skills (21%) and soft skills (16%), ahead of technical skills at only 14%.
There have been many reports published in recent years by banks, multilateral organisations and consultancies predicting a rapid growth in Asia household and high net-worth individual wealth and, by implication a concomitant expansion of the regional fund management industry.
For instance, in its 2018 Wealth Report, Julius Bear estimates that Asia’s pool of investible assets held by people with more than $1m (excluding their homes) will reach $14.5trn by next year, representing growth of 160% in the current decade.
