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FundFire recently covered the state of institutional investment manager websites. At least seven institutional managers are in various stages of revamping their online presence.

A summary of the key article sections is presented below:

Managers Repower Websites for Inst’l Clients

Article published on May 20, 2010
By Scott Johnson

AllianceBernstein has overhauled its website for institutional clients, making the firm the first to market among a group of at least seven asset managers that are revamping their online presence.

A “wave” of other firms are also hard at work on their own website redesigns, says Steven Miyao, founder and CEO of strategic consultancy kasina. He declines to cite specific names but says at least six other managers are at various stages of their own full-scale overhauls. Their approaches vary, but most firms are developing graphics and interactive features to drive visitors toward relevant content that has been tailored for each client segment.

“That’s really the core of what you want,” says Miyao. “You want to be able to expose all of that content, because in the past, the majority of content on the site was never visited or visited very briefly.”

The typical manager’s website – which Miyao describes as “a list of information with top and side navigation,” requiring far too many clicks – is looking shopworn. In the past, managers have forced visitors to hunt for information, but social media and news websites have raised the bar. Nearly all decision-makers in the institutional space are now “consumers of web content,” says Miyao, and a bad online experience reflects poorly on a manager.

Among the firms that have already completed redesigns, Miyao cites Franklin Templeton Investments, which launched its new site in January. Other managers – such as BlackRock and JPMorgan Asset Management – have made gradual improvements to their existing sites in the past year. And FundFire has noticed Wells Capital Management building out its website over the last six months with new product information and biographies of key personnel. Some of those changes seem to stem from the firm’s integration of Evergreen Investments, which parent company Wells Fargo absorbed in its acquisition of Wachovia.

But the key [website] improvement is organization, aided by Flash applications, he says. Visitors will not have to click away from the site as they make choices about what they want to read, and they’re not bombarded with information that doesn’t address their slice of the market. And even as they hone in on specific research, they can read an abstract first, rather than having to skim full documents to glean the value of the content. “These kinds of features are very contemporary, and that’s how organizations are able to present much more detailed information upfront without having to really click through deeper and deeper into the site,” says Miyao, who sums up the improvements across the industry with one word: “usability.”

From a design standpoint, features that have become the norm outside of the asset management industry – such as using more graphics, requiring less scrolling, and breaking content into chunks – are slowly becoming standard within the industry, he says. “But a lot of firms are still sort of behind in that.”

Indeed, some managers still believe that relationship managers should be driving all interactions with clients, says Miyao. But, he says, “if the firm has a good site and the relationship manager can work with the site, then the site really can support the relationship manager.”