About This Series
Welcome to Bridging the Gap, a series exploring the most critical challenges in fund distribution and how Fundpath is transforming the way fund sellers and fund buyers connect.
Every week, across the fund distribution landscape, a familiar dynamic plays out on both sides of the market.
A fund seller prepares a pitch based on what they knew about a firm six months ago. The contact they had built a relationship with has moved on. The investment committee has shifted its priorities. The outreach lands, but it misses, because the intelligence behind it has aged out.
On the other side, a fund buyer at an independent asset manager, a private bank, or a multi-family office receives another wave of approaches. Some are relevant. Most are not. The challenge is not the volume alone, it is the mismatch between what fund sellers communicate and what fund buyers are actually working on.
At the heart of this dynamic lies a structural problem: the Information Disconnect.
Understanding the Information Disconnect
The Information Disconnect affects both sides of the fund distribution market: fund sellers, who distribute investment products, and fund buyers, who evaluate and select them. It is not a failure of intent on either side. It is a structural problem, one that has persisted because the intelligence needed to connect the two sides has never been made visible in a systematic way.
Fund Sellers
For fund sellers, the Information Disconnect stems from a reliance on outdated tools and incomplete data. Static CRMs, legacy data systems, and personal but partial networks guide their sales and marketing outreach. These methods may have served well enough in a slower-moving market, but the fund-buying landscape does not stand still.
Independent asset managers rebrand or restructure. Private banks shift their approved lists and model portfolio frameworks. Multi-family offices reconfigure investment committees. Key personnel move between firms, taking institutional knowledge with them. Without data that reflects these changes in near real time, fund sellers are left working from a picture of the market that is already out of date.
The absence of forward-looking data compounds this further. Fund sellers often have no visibility into which asset classes or investment strategies fund buyers are currently researching, or where they plan to shift capital over the coming months.
The result is a scattergun approach: broad outreach, generic messaging, and a significant proportion of effort directed at firms, individuals, or mandates that are simply not a fit, through no fault of the fund seller, but at considerable cost to them.
Fund Buyers
Fund buyers, on the receiving end of this dynamic, bear a different but equally real burden.
Fund selectors across the market, whether at independent asset managers, private banks, cantonal banks, or multi-family offices, receive a constant stream of approaches from fund sellers. The volume is manageable when the outreach is relevant. The problem is that much of it is not: approaches that do not reflect the firm’s current structure, mandate parameters, or investment priorities.
Over time, the cumulative effect is disengagement. Approaches that might have been welcome under different circumstances are screened out because the signal-to-noise ratio makes careful evaluation impractical.
Smaller fund buyers are disproportionately affected. Without the brand visibility of the largest firms, they receive less attention from fund sellers, even when their mandates represent genuine opportunity. They are frequently overlooked not because they lack potential, but because they lack visibility.
What Changes When The Disconnect Is Resolved
The Information Disconnect is not inevitable. It persists because the intelligence that would resolve it, including firm structures, buying parameters, live investment priorities, personnel changes, has never been systematically collected, maintained, and shared.
When it is, the picture changes on both sides.
For fund sellers, it means the ability to approach the right firms, with the right message, at the right time, guided by current intelligence rather than assumptions. Outreach becomes more purposeful. Conversations become more productive. Time previously spent on discovery or on approaches that were never going to land is redirected toward engagement that is already well-grounded.
For fund buyers, it means less noise and more relevance. The outreach they receive better reflects their firm’s actual priorities – which means fewer approaches to filter out, and more conversations worth having.
This is what led to the founding of Fundpath: a data and intelligence platform built to close the Information Disconnect, giving both sides of the market the clarity they need to engage with precision.
In our next article, we explore why Fundpath was built: the founding story behind the platform, and the observations about fund distribution that made it necessary.
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