The Investor Lifecycle in 2026: 5 Takeaways That Should Be on Every Fund Manager's Radar

I recently had the privilege of moderating a session with two of the sharpest minds in fund services: Neil DeRosario, VP of Buy Side Product at Fenergo, and Aman Abahel, Global Head of Fund Services at TMF Group. The conversation was candid, data-driven, and at times challenging. Here are the five takeaways every fund manager needs to hear.

1. The Fragmentation Problem Is Getting Worse

The numbers we shared during the session stopped a few people in their tracks. Seventy-four percent of asset management firms have lost a client due to slow or inefficient onboarding, up from 48% just three years ago. Meanwhile, 79% of asset managers take between one and three months to onboard a single institutional investor, and only 21% have a fully automated onboarding process.

What Neil made clear is that the root cause is not any one failure point. It is the disconnection between systems: a portal here, a screening tool there, a document platform somewhere else, none of them sharing a single investor record. The result is duplicated data collection, manual email chains, and compliance teams absorbing pressure without the tools to move faster.

2. Digitizing a Document Is Not the Same as Digitizing a Process

This was one of the sharpest moments of the session. Neil drew a clear line between the two: attaching an eSignature to a PDF is not a digital subscription workflow. The operations team is still rekeying data. The compliance team is still chasing documents over email. You have digitized the signature, not the process.

A truly digital subscription journey connects the investor's data intake directly to compliance scoping, KYC/KYI requirements, and fund administrator handoff, with no rekey, no version control issues, and no manual chasing. As Neil put it, the subscription document should be an output of the process, not the process itself.

3. Compliance Can Be an Enabler, Not a Bottleneck

Fifty-two percent of firms spend between 60 and 150 days completing a single KYC review. When you compound that across KYC, KYI, KYD, KYE, and KYT obligations, each with its own data requirements, timelines, and ownership, the onboarding timeline stretches from weeks into months.

The shift Neil described is treating all of these as a single connected workflow. When an investor subscribes, the platform automatically scopes the correct compliance requirements based on fund domicile, investor type, and applicable policy. Data cascades across all obligations from one investor record, eliminating parallel workstreams and redundant document requests. Compliance stops being a reason investors walk away and starts being a competitive differentiator. 

4. Agentic AI Is Moving from Concept to Production

Both Neil and Aman were clear on this: the conversation around AI is no longer theoretical. TMF Group has already achieved measurable ROI from document processing, workflow triage, and large-scale migration of investor data.

Fenergo has gone further with a suite of task-based agents covering document classification, sanctions screening with auto-resolution of false positives, event-driven KYC monitoring, third-party data sourcing, and straight-through processing of low-risk cases. Early adoption data shows periodic review timeframes being reduced by up to 45%. Every agent decision is logged with a full audit trail, directly addressing the three areas of industry hesitancy: explainability, auditability, and governance. 

5. The Three-Year Outlook Is Closer Than You Think

The consensus Aman and Neil reached was striking. Within two to three years, the distinction between onboarding and ongoing monitoring will disappear. The investor lifecycle will become continuous, always current, always compliant, and always governed by policy.

Aman made the point that for TMF Group, in many respects, that future is already a reality. The firms that invest now in a single authoritative data record and connected architecture will operate in a fundamentally different commercial reality from those still running quarterly manual reviews. As Neil put it, the gap between those two operating models is decisive.

Want to hear the full discussion? Watch the webinar on demand here.

Ready to see what a connected investor lifecycle looks like in practice? Book a demonstration with the Fenergo team and find out how your firm can move from fragmented to seamless.