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As clients demand more personalisation and portfolios become increasingly multifaceted, wealth managers across Asia Pacific are evolving. Hassan Suffyan, head of wealth for APAC & EMEA at MSCI, shares how firms are balancing the discipline of house views within both advisory and discretionary portfolios while adapting to a new era of client personalisation.
Q: From your conversations with clients across Asia Pacific, what specific challenges are they bringing to your attention?
Clients are no longer satisfied with generic, one-size-fits-all solutions, but most firms struggle with three main issues. Many firms’ tech stacks have been built for a particular segment, e.g., retail or private banking, or for a proposition, e.g., advisory or discretionary portfolio management (DPM).
Investment processes, as a result, also end up being operationally structured around rigid frameworks, such as model portfolios that lack flexibility or portfolios built entirely bottom-up, leading to wide dispersion in portfolio performance. Our recent survey found that 58% of wealth professionals believe it is easier to build a new custom model than to adjust an existing one,1 which suggests how rigid current systems are.
In Asia Pacific, this challenge is more pronounced because advisory mandates dominate and often, they do not follow model portfolios. In contrast, discretionary portfolios are generally aligned to a centralised model portfolio. Clients within a DPM service may still desire a personalised approach while not being actively involved in day-to-day decision making. Our research shows that achieving this requires a delicate balance between the house view and client objectives.
The need for personalisation within this offering often creates a daily operational challenge. Providing bespoke portfolio construction across thousands of clients is resource-intensive, and firms are looking for ways to systematise personalisation without losing its essence.
With the growing demand for systematic personalisation, it is necessary to maintain the investment discipline and efficiency of model portfolios while accounting for individual client needs and preferences.
Q: How are firms evolving to deal with these complexities?
There is a clear shift toward total portfolio oversight and building platforms that support the wealth continuum. Clients are increasingly asking their providers to explain how all their assets work together in driving risk and return. But many firms are still constrained by legacy systems, fragmented data and lack the analytical capabilities to provide a true total portfolio overview.
For ultra high net worth (UHNW), multi-generational families, this shift is especially significant. Their portfolios often combine businesses, private equity, real estate and liquid investments, each with different liquidity profiles and risk characteristics. Bringing these components together into a single portfolio construction and risk framework requires data integration and better analytical visibility across asset classes.
This demand is growing rapidly. Our survey also found that over 80% of global wealth managers expect to increase allocations to private markets over the next three years.2 Firms that can analyse how these diverse exposures interact are starting to deliver a much clearer picture of total portfolio behaviour.
We see many firms in Asia Pacific already advancing along this path, supported by better data integration and a greater appreciation of risk factor analysis, particularly for the purposes of understanding correlations between public and private holdings, measuring total and marginal risk, and ultimately identifying portfolio behaviour under various market scenarios.
Q: What approaches are firms implementing to balance their centralised investment philosophy with client personalisation demands?
There is a fundamental shift from thinking about personalisation as an exception to their investment process to making it an integral part of how they express their house views. Instead of building separate models for every client preference, developing constraint-aware frameworks can help systematically adapt their core investment philosophy.
Understanding that personalisation does not mean abandoning systematic approaches. It means making those approaches more agile and adaptive. A firm’s house view on risk management, quality preferences or growth characteristics can be consistently applied even when clients want to integrate sustainability, thematic exposures or have existing concentrated positions.
This works particularly well with factor-based analysis, which allows portfolio managers to include client preferences and personalisation needs whilst still benefiting from the research produced by the CIO function. Instead of just looking at asset class allocations, successful firms analyse the underlying sources of return, asset allocation and instrument selection to deliver personalised outcomes for their clients.
Q: What advice would you give to wealth managers and private banks looking to evolve their approach to model portfolios under a discretionary setting to meet these demands?
We are operating in a period of rapid change and evolving client expectations. Providers need robust, versatile tools to navigate the complexities of modern investment landscapes.
Identifying which client-sub segment to begin with is key to implementing new tools and techniques. Quite often in the UHNW and family office segment, there is a higher degree of customisation. In those instances, scalability is not the issue; rather, it is about managing complexity.
The needs of retail or mass affluent segments may not require as much complexity, but they need high operational throughput. Often it is easier to start with one or the other and solve incrementally, working closely with one or more partners, rather than to try a “big bang” approach that can be highly disruptive and delay benefit realisation.
Understanding the type of personalisation that clients are seeking is also key. This can be expressed as clients seeking a bespoke asset allocation, controlling exposure to specific themes, sectors or markets, controlling exposure to certain instruments and issuers, and reflecting personal sustainability preferences.
The client can ask for any combination of the above, ranging from no exposure to seeking an overweight exposure. Breaking personalisation down into its constituent parts is the first step in building a scalable, systematic process that, when handled correctly, may result in more predictable outcomes.
To learn more about how firms are leveraging next-generation solutions to optimise and scale client service, visit MSCI Wealth Management Solutions.
Footnotes
1 https://www.msci.com/research-and-insights/research-reports/2025-wealth-trends
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