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:
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:
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:
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.
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 They have teams, processes, and networks in place, but their supporting toolkit is often outdated.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.
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:
When every hour saved is reinvested in deeper analysis or smarter collaboration, the compounding impact is significant for teams and portfolios alike.
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:
Altogether, this elevates team productivity, strengthens governance, and leads to better investment outcomes.
Efficiency, productivity, and governance gains from agile processes are real and measurable... regardless of firm size.
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.
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.
