CLIENT PERSPECTIVES ON GROWTH & CHANGE

Building on the success of the 2024 inaugural series, this year at our State Street Alpha APAC Growth Summit, we sought to gather once again to share insights on pressing topics in the institutional investment industry across all asset classes, while fostering a great opportunity to network with peers, forge new partnerships, and shape the future with industry experts from across the value chain.

Among the many discussions, themes of transformation and the power of strategic partnerships stood out. As businesses across the region continue to evolve, collaboration and innovation are becoming key enablers of long term growth. Let's hear what our attendees had to say.

What's really resonated with me is the focus on change. All businesses are going through it. We're really busy dealing with it in terms of regulatory, market, data. Change is everywhere in the business and we need to look at it in a positive fashion because it's not going to stop.

I found the executive panel discussion very engaging. A key theme in that discussion was transformation and the different journeys each organisation are on. That has a key correlation with the activity I'm working closely on from a Perpetual perspective. So good to hear different views and a different lens of how others are approaching this issue.

The key takeaway I've seen has really been the long term vision that our clients have. They're not thinking about just the short term anymore, about how they solve problems in the 2 to 3 year time horizon. They're really looking for partners who can think about 5, 10, 20 years even because they're thinking about AI and these big generational shifts in the industry, and they want to make sure they're set up for success no matter what happens over the next decade.

Innovation comes from leaders who are prepared to own and drive change in a way, knowing that we're all inherently actually nervous and slightly anxious about change as humans. I think clients see a lot of value in that it's not a one size fits all solution. So we think about meeting clients where they're at in their transformation journey, removing friction, retiring systems, improving operating processes, and ultimately supporting them as a platform for growth.

Our investment data platform is integrated with State Street's Alpha Data Platform, which gives us the ability to enrich data sources from different providers. It gives us the ability to have private markets data in our platform, responsible investment data, which we then stitch together to actually provide greater insights, more detailed look-through of our portfolio to drive better investment decisions.

The solutions that we're offering involve technology and our platform is an enabler. It's technology powered by services, and that's striking a lot of interest in coming to State Street to look for those solutions.

These conversations highlight how collaboration and shared vision are critical to progress, and why forums like this remain so valuable. We thank you for joining us in 2025, and look forward to welcoming you at our 2026 summit.

At this year's State Street Alpha APAC Growth Summit, many of the discussions circle back to two themes: private markets and data. Both are creating real momentum in the region and reshaping how institutions think about opportunity. Let's hear what our attendees had to say.

The most promising opportunities for private markets over the next couple of years is the access to data and improved decision making. And that really means bringing together the information across the diverse asset classes, all the way through the lifecycle, really rolling up the ability to understand exposures, types of assets, types of managers and gain deep insights across the book. But also being able to enable your total fund exposure views and those investment decisions.

So the three most significant ways for our organisation to use data to drive growth is unified data platform, allows us to make faster decision and automation allows us to scale, and data transparency allows us to help stakeholders to trust the data.

So we have started the journey of, you know, exploring how we are able to leverage on data technology to enhance our investment capabilities and enhance our investment coverage.

Top three tech capabilities that I see really being critical in private markets is one, AI. And the area to highlight is just the ability to extract information from all the different documents. So PDFs, Excel, etc. Second component would really be around data modeling. So the ability to get that data into a format, consistently that you can look across your whole portfolio and actually drive insight with the information. The third component I would highlight is workflow. So historically, private markets has really been relying on people versus process, and so as those processes become more standardised and as people start to work more and more in systems having an end-to-end workflow where those hand-off points are defined is really critical.

For continuous improvement, the most imperative thing would be to see a hybrid model where AI is combined with the human touch and to resonate with all the speakers who said that AI is important, but it cannot replace—it needs to work together.

I think the most important trends and opportunities in tech and data at the moment are really around investment in consumption based data management services and solutions to help deliver faster, better insights from all that data. And then building on that, really with both generative AI and increasingly in agentic AI to really sort of further that data democratisation and that ability to derive those insights more quickly.

From evolving data strategies to expanding private market access, the APAC region is redefining what's possible for institutional investors. We thank you for joining us in 2025, and look forward to welcoming you at our 2026 summit.