Key summary:

• Fund communications remain outdated. Despite global AUM hitting record levels, most fund managers still rely on static PDFs,  while investors increasingly consume content via mobile and audio.

• Regulatory and operational pressure is mounting. MiFID II and PRIIPs are demanding clearer, more accessible disclosures, while manual production workflows are buckling under the load.

• Automation is the operational unlock. Managers who solve the operational problem first (faster production, consistent output, multi-format distribution) will be best positioned to compete for investor attention.

Fund managers are operating in a paradox. Assets under management are at record levels, with the global AUM reaching $135 trillion in 2024, the largest single-year increase of the decade according to McKinsey's 2025 Asset Management Report. Yet the way most managers communicate with investors has remained largely unchanged for nearly two decades. The dominant format is still the PDF: static, non-searchable, and built for a distribution world that no longer exists.

That gap between record assets and outdated communication formats is not a minor inefficiency. It is a structural risk. As distribution channels evolve, investor expectations shift, and regulatory requirements tighten, fund managers who fail to rethink how they communicate will find themselves losing ground, not on performance, but on relevance.

This article examines where fund communications stand today, what the data reveals about where they are heading, and what it means for the fund managers who are trying to compete for investor attention in an increasingly fragmented distribution landscape.

A Changing Distribution Landscape. An Unchanged Fund Commentary Process.

The data on how professional and retail investors consume content is unambiguous. Digital and social channels now drive the discovery and evaluation of investment products at scale. 

According to a 2023 Digital Investor Survey by Brunswick Group, 81% of investors made a recommendation or investment decision after initially sourcing information through digital or social media. A further 88% investigated a company or fund based on content posted on digital channels. In the past, you would have to call a financial planner to get advice on what, when and how to invest.

Even as of now, the format most commonly delivered through any digital channel remains the PDF, a document format conceived in the early 1990s, long before mobile-first consumption became the norm.

The shift in consumption habits is particularly sharp when it comes to audio. The global podcasting market was valued at $30.72 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 27% through 2030, according to Grand View Research. Critically for asset managers, the fastest-growing genre is not entertainment: it is technology, business, and finance content, growing at a 30% CAGR through 2030, according to Mordor Intelligence's Podcast Market Report. The Mordor report also highlights a concrete example from the institutional world, a Frankfurt-listed asset manager that replaced its quarterly investor roadshow with a bilingual audio series, averaging 42 minutes per episode, that drove measurably higher engagement with investor relations content.

Meanwhile, over 70% of global podcast listeners access content via mobile devices (Ofcom, Top Podcast Listening Trends, September 2024; Polaris Market Research, 2025). The investor who reads a quarterly commentary on a desktop in their office is increasingly an exception. The norm is mobile, on-demand, and often audio.

Regulatory Pressure Is Raising the Bar on Clarity

The regulatory environment is not making things easier for firms wedded to dense, text-heavy documentation. Under the European Union's Packaged Retail Investment and Insurance-based Products (PRIIPs) regulation and MiFID II, fund managers are required to provide investors with Key Information Documents (KIDs) that communicate risks, costs, and performance in clear and accessible language. 

The requirement is explicit: documentation must be comprehensible to a retail investor. Dense, jargon-laden PDFs do not meet that spirit, and increasingly, regulators are paying attention to substance, not just technical compliance.

The 2024 updates to MiFID II extended the scope of transaction reporting to include alternative investment fund managers (AIFMs) under MiFIR II, increasing the volume and specificity of disclosures required. Firms that rely on manual, document-heavy workflows to produce these disclosures are exposed to both accuracy and timeliness risk.

The FE fundinfo Asset Managers Report 2024, based on research with 100 senior industry leaders, found that regulatory changes were cited as the top threat by 41% of respondents. More telling: 37% of managers identified regulatory document production as the single most resource-intensive process in their operations, while 79% said data intelligence was extremely or very important for effective decision-making. In short, the bottleneck is not the quality of the underlying investment insight, it is the workflow required to turn that insight into compliant, timely, investor-facing communications.

The Operational Reality: Manual Processes Are Holding Managers Back

For most asset managers, producing fund commentary remains a largely manual exercise. Data is pulled from multiple disconnected systems, formatted in one environment, reviewed in another, approved in a third, and finally distributed via email as an attachment. Another FE fundinfo research found that nearly 90% of managers report they are under pressure to deliver fund data faster and more accurately, while 46% identify legacy systems as the single greatest obstacle to improving operational efficiency.

This is a structural problem, not just an operational inconvenience. When commentary cycles, like quarterly letters, factsheets, regulatory disclosures, consume disproportionate team capacity, something else suffers: the quality of the narrative, the timeliness of distribution, and the capacity to think about channel strategy at all.

According to PwC's 2024 Asset and Wealth Management Report, which surveyed 264 asset managers across 28 countries, 80% of AWM organizations report that disruptive technologies including AI are expected to fuel revenue growth. Firms adopting technology-as-a-service platforms could see a 12% revenue boost by 2028. Yet 68% of respondents currently allocate less than one-sixth of capital to innovative and potentially transformative technologies, with only 20% currently using such technologies to improve personalized investor communications.

The gap between stated intent and actual investment is significant. And in a business where distribution and client communication are competitive differentiators, that gap has major consequences.

What Automation Actually Changes

We believe the core problem in fund communications is not necessarily the lack of creativity or analytical capability, but the ratio of time spent on structured, repeatable tasks versus time available for strategy and judgment.

A quarterly fund letter follows a predictable architecture: market context, fund positioning, attribution, outlook. Significant portions of that structure (particularly the data-driven sections) are repeatable across reporting cycles. The same is true for factsheet updates, regulatory disclosures, and multilingual fund summaries.

When those repeatable components are automated, portfolio managers regain time for the elements that require genuine judgment: narrative positioning, differentiated market commentary, and the kind of forward-looking insight that actually moves investor confidence.

This is the operational case for tools like InvestSuite's StoryTeller for Fund Commentary. By automating the structured, data-intensive portions of the commentary workflow, fund managers reduce production time, improve consistency across languages and share classes, and create the operational headroom to think about how that commentary is distributed (and in what formats).

FE fundinfo's Adam Graham describes the outcome precisely: one global manager reduced manual effort by more than half through strategic automation and redirected that capacity into product development and client services (IFA Magazine, June 2025). Automation has transcended being just a cost-reduction exercise becoming a reallocation of human capital toward higher-value activity.

What Commentary Formats Fund Managers Are Often Overlooking?

Automation creates a second-order opportunity that is often overlooked: it opens up the question of format and channel strategy. When producing a quarterly commentary no longer consumes the available bandwidth, managers can start asking: who actually reads this? On what device? At what point in their research process?

According to IR Magazine's 2023 Global Investor Relations Practice Report, only 65% of institutional investors find IR (Investor Relations) websites very useful when researching new investment opportunities. This suggests that even the primary digital channel for fund communications is underperforming, not because the content is weak, but because it is not meeting investors in the formats and environments they actually use.

The data on podcast growth is indicative here. With corporate and enterprise adoption of audio content growing at a 30% CAGR (Mordor Intelligence, 2024) and business and finance content among the fastest-growing podcast genres, the asset management industry is looking at a distribution channel that is underutilized relative to where investor attention is moving.

The shift does not require abandoning text-based communications. Regulatory requirements alone ensure that written documentation will remain central. But the fund managers gaining distribution ground are those who treat their written commentary as a source asset, from which audio, summary, and digital-native formats can be derived.

The Competitive Advantage Is Operational Before It Is Narrative

The fund communications challenge is often framed as a marketing problem: how do we tell a better story? That framing misses the deeper issue. The managers who will win the distribution battle in the next five years are those who solve the operational problem first.

When commentary production is faster, consistent, and less dependent on manual coordination, three things become possible: 

• distribution timelines compress (content reaches investors when it is most relevant, not weeks after a quarter closes); 

• format diversification becomes practical (the same underlying narrative can be delivered as a written letter, a two-minute audio summary, and a mobile-optimized factsheet); 

• compliance risk decreases (structured automation reduces the human error that creates regulatory exposure in disclosures and KIDs).

McKinsey's 2025 report on the global asset management industry observes that individual investors now account for more than 80% of total global net flows. These investors consume content differently than institutional peers. They use mobile. They listen to audio. They expect the same quality of communication experience they receive from consumer brands.

Fund managers who build the operational infrastructure to meet those expectations will find the distribution conversation becomes meaningfully easier.

What This Means in Practice

The state of fund communications in 2025 can be summarized as follows: the asset management industry sits on record AUM, growing regulatory complexity, and an investor base that is increasingly mobile and audio-native, while the majority of fund communications remain outdated, manually produced, and built for distribution channels that are losing audience share.

The good news is that the tools to address this are mature and proven. Automation platforms purpose-built for fund commentary workflows, like InvestSuite’s StoryTeller for Fund Commentary, exist precisely to remove the structural friction that keeps managers trapped in the paper era. The question is no longer whether the technology works. It is whether the operational investment is made before the distribution gap becomes a competitive liability.

The fund managers who will lead the next decade of distribution are already asking a different question. From: how do we produce better commentaries? To: how do we build the infrastructure to communicate with investors in the formats, channels, and cadences they actually use?

If you’re interested in seeing how StoryTeller can help your team increase their operational efficiency, schedule a meeting and our experts will be more than happy to demonstrate its capabilities.