5 min read

How Agile Improves Asset Manager Selection Process

Agile Investment Manager Selection process depicted by breakdancer.
By
Asset Manager Support
11 Jan 2022
5 min read
Agile is a proven framework that improves how selectors find, evaluate, and appoint investment managers. By combining modern digital tools with well-structured teams and processes, selectors can unlock higher-quality decisions, stronger collaboration, and better portfolio outcomes.

What Is An Agile Investment Manager Selection Process?

Taken from software development practices, agile is an organisational framework that helps investment teams make smarter decisions, faster. When applied to asset manager selection, “agile” means creating an adaptable system that brings the right information, people, and tools together at the right time.

To become agile, institutional investors must reimagine the way they operate across three key building blocks (see Exhibit 1):

1. Value Chain

Agility starts by mapping out the end-to-end journey of manager selection, from market research to funding and continuous evaluation. Each step, from sourcing managers to conducting due diligence, must be clearly defined.

This structure allows teams to identify bottlenecks, avoid duplicated work, and ensure nothing falls through the cracks. Common activities in this chain include:

  • Macro and asset class research
  • Sourcing and evaluating managers
  • Qualitative and quantitative analysis
  • Team collaboration and data sharing
  • Ongoing governance and decision reviews

2. Skillsets

Having the right roles in place is crucial, but so is understanding how those roles interact. Agile teams break down silos by fostering collaboration across specialists, strategists, and compliance experts:

  • Asset class experts and generalists
  • ESG and risk executives
  • Legal and compliance professionals
  • Mid and back-office roles
  • External oversight participants

Each person of the chain contributes unique expertise, but agility comes from how seamlessly they work together.

In agile settings, responsibilities are clearly mapped, allowing teams to shift quickly without losing alignment.

3. Digital Tools

Technology is what ties everything together. Without the right infrastructure, even the best teams and processes struggle to scale. Agile investment selection relies on digital platforms that support:

  • Seamless data integration
  • Real-time collaboration
  • Transparent workflows
  • Clear audit trails

When data infrastructure and decision systems are built to support human expertise, selectors can act faster, more confidently, and with greater consistency.

Overall, an agile approach in investment manager selection process gives your team the structure, talent, and tools to adapt to fast-moving markets and complex mandates. It’s not about speed for speed’s sake, but it’s about smarter, more collaborative, data-powered decision-making.

Are All Investment Manager Selectors Agile?

Most professional selectors already exhibit some agile characteristics. They have teams, processes, and networks in place, but their supporting toolkit is often outdated. Commonly, this means stitching together performance databases, spreadsheets, and shared drives to manage selection work. It’s functional, but far from optimal.

And that means most teams aren't truly working agile, because they’re not leveraging technology to enhance speed, collaboration, or decision quality.

The transition to agile may seem daunting, but it’s typically just a small structural shift with large returns. COVID-era remote work catalyzed the need for change, revealing how fragile older workflows are under pressure. Now, as mandates become more specific and specialized, modern tools can dramatically improve both operational efficiency and search effectiveness.

The choice for teams today is clear: stick with the status quo and accept slower outcomes, or upgrade and unlock higher performance with better tools.

How Agile Investment Manager Selectors Improve Portfolio Performance

In practice, shifting to an agile model can drive a 30–50% increase in operational efficiency. That’s not just internal uplift, it can translate into tangible performance gains like tens of basis points of additional net alpha annually across a portfolio of external asset managers.

Why? Because agile teams spend less time navigating fragmented workflows and more time making better-informed decisions.

Digital toolkits like RFPnetworks make this possible. They allow selectors to replace outdated manual steps, saving hours spent tracking down documents, versioning files, or coordinating evaluations over email. These platforms become enablers of organisational value creation, improving:

  • Time budgets: Once you switch from outdated toolkits to a digital one, you spend less time collecting quantitative and qualitative data manually and more time analyzing insights that actually drive better outcomes.
  • Team engagement: When tools reduce administrative friction, team members can focus on high-value, intellectually rewarding tasks, increasing overall contribution.
  • Decision quality: Centralised data and clear workflows ensure decisions are based on complete, current, and consistent information which reduces errors and bias.
  • Cross-team transparency: With everything tracked in one place, all stakeholders, from analysts to oversight committees, gain visibility into the process, which strengthens trust and accountability.

When every hour saved is reinvested in deeper analysis or smarter collaboration, the compounding impact is significant for teams and portfolios alike.

WIN ASSETS FASTER
Learn how to leverage sales, marketing & RFP teams
FIND BETTER MANAGERS
Learn how asset allocators optimise process

How Agile Investment Manager Process Improves Team Performance

Agile processes enhance team performance by pushing the evaluation frontier outward, giving selectors more time, better tools, and access to richer datasets.

Based on Exhibit 2, digital tools improve performance across three major dimensions:

  • Time Budgets: Manual, non-value-add tasks like email chasing, file sorting, or administrative coordination get automated or eliminated. Teams can redirect time to the analytical work such as reading research, scoring, interpreting, and discussing.
  • Breadth & Depth of Analysis: With data more accessible and easier to process, selectors can evaluate a broader set of managers with greater granularity. RFPnetworks help users filter, benchmark, and compare both qualitative and quantitative inputs in a central location, improving collaboration and reducing siloed thinking.
  • Decision Confidence & Quality: Digital infrastructure enables better version control, clearer audit trails, and full transparency into who made which decisions and why. When everything is visible and organised, decision-making becomes not only faster but more robust and defendable.

Altogether, this elevates team productivity, strengthens governance, and leads to better investment outcomes.

Which Investment Manager Selection Teams Benefit Most from an Agile Process?

Efficiency, productivity, and governance gains from agile processes are real and measurable... regardless of firm size.

  • Smaller teams benefit from automation and structure, which stretch limited resources and reduce the need for manual work.
  • Larger teams benefit from collaborative intelligence and transparent workflows that strengthen evaluation rigor and decision-making speed.

In both cases, digitising your selection process unlocks new capacity. Once administrative and operational friction is reduced, especially around sourcing, document management, and data collection, teams can shift focus to higher-value work: sourcing and evaluating more great managers.

Even with limited resources, teams that adopt agile methods can expand their asset manager reach, reduce time on manual due diligence processes, and drive better decisions. That’s the power of an agile operating model.

TL;DR

Agile manager selection brings together structured workflows, cross-functional collaboration, and digital tools to help investment teams make faster, smarter decisions. It replaces fragmented, manual processes with integrated systems that improve efficiency, transparency, and decision quality... without sacrificing rigor.

Most teams already have the right people and intent, but outdated tools hold them back. By adopting agile methods and platforms like RFPnetworks, selectors can reduce admin load, evaluate more managers in depth, and improve outcomes, often gaining 30–50% in operational efficiency and unlocking real alpha in the process.

See how our tools...
- Get your capabilities noticed
- Generate inbound leads
- Grow your AuM faster
Discover the toolkit
See how our tools...
- Scan managers globally
- Centralize and compare data
- Leverage teams & processes
Discover the toolkit