Over the past nine months, Aiviq has run an engaging series of customer forum sessions bringing together operations, finance and product leaders from our network of asset managers. All under Chatham House Rules.
The brief was simple: understand how firms actually manage client agreements and financial terms, what insights and value they expect to extract from them, and ensure the product we are building is aligned with the needs of the market. For the asset managers who took part, the value ran both ways: a chance to benchmark their own practices against their peers, and an active voice in shaping the direction of the Aiviq roadmap.
The sessions ran as follows:
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All discussions were held under Chatham House Rules, and the benchmarking survey conducted was anonymised and aggregated. No insight from the survey is attributable to any individual firm or participant. Below are the 7 most pertinent themes that emerged from the sessions.
1. Ownership of terms management is fragmented, and that's the root cause of most other problems
Our peer benchmarking survey enquired into who owns the end-to-end terms management process, and 50% of the working group responded that there was no single owner for terms management. The activities were fragmented across sales, finance, client services, and legal - each department (team) playing a role in the end-to-end terms management process. Client Services emerged as the function most commonly involved, closely followed by Sales/Distribution, Finance Operations and Legal & Compliance.
Beyond the core team, every firm in the group also reported additional staff elsewhere in the business spending meaningful time on agreements and terms work, on top of their formal remit. This isn't a resourcing problem, but a structural one. When 4-5 teams in the business each own a slice of the same client relationship data, discrepancies and errors are inevitable.
2. Discounting is getting more creative, and the tooling hasn't kept pace
Across the working group, standard and non-standard term discounting processes are both firmly in play, typically governed by some form of committee: a pricing committee, a fee consulting function, or a governance body made up of department leads. That committee structure isn't new - what's changed is the pressure it's under. Sales teams are getting more creative with how they structure discounts as net fees compress and distributors push harder, and the range of non-standard terms being negotiated has grown well beyond what most approval tooling was built to handle.
Around three-quarters of the group confirmed that Finance or Client Services teams formally assess term feasibility before sign-off, so the governance discipline is there. But that assessment is still largely a manual exercise - reasoning through a proposed rate by pulling numbers from separate systems - at exactly the moment when the complexity of what's being asked for is increasing.
3. Most firms know broadly what their revenue was, not what it will be
Our peer benchmarking survey asked our working group what insights they are able to produce today, and a clear pattern emerged: retrospective revenue reporting is generally a shared capability, but forward-looking revenue capabilities are limited. Very few Managers could comfortably produce Agreement-level annualised revenue over the last two years, or forecast an estimated rebate payment ahead of the next quarter-end cycle.
This gap matters. Distribution economics move quickly, and a finance or distribution team that can only look backwards does not have key information needed for strategic planning and is always negotiating from a position of partial information.
4. Systems integration is the single biggest blocker to getting value out of terms data
Our peer benchmarking survey asked Managers what prevents insight extraction from their terms data, and lack of integration between tools and systems was the top-ranked answer across the group, ahead of limited analytical tooling and legacy system constraints. In fact, every single respondent in the group flagged it - the only barrier to reach unanimous agreement. The large majority of the working group described their terms data as either disconnected from their Client Book of Record and CRM, reliant on manual workarounds to bridge the two, or in the process of building that integration - rather than genuinely joined up today.
This is a tooling integration issue. Sales, finance and senior leadership all want to consume terms and revenue data; it's the links between the tools and systems that are missing.
5. Invoicing and statements often lack the explainability distributors actually want
Across the discussion on statement generation and invoicing, a consistent picture emerged: there's no shared standard for how these are produced or delivered - formats span Excel, email, spreadsheets and PDF, often varying client by client. But the more interesting finding was what distributors actually care about underneath that formatting inconsistency: timely and accurate figures, yes, but just as importantly, an explainable breakdown of which assets were in scope, what methodology was applied, and a clear summary of what's changed since the prior period. Format matters less than being able to answer "why is this number what it is."
6. Everyone has tried AI terms extraction. The results have been mixed.
Automated agreement, terms and obligations extraction came out on top when we asked our working group which future capability mattered most - but plenty in the room had already tried some version of it, whether through generic document AI tools, RPA scripts, or in-house builds, with mixed results. Worth understanding why.
Extracting a term type or a fee percentage off a page isn't the hard part. The hard part is mapping the language a lawyer or distributor actually used - "management fee rebate," "trail," "retrocession," inconsistent even within one firm's own agreement library - onto a single, structured set of mastered values that a calculation engine can actually run against. Get that mapping wrong, silently, and you don't get an error message. You get a wrong number in a client statement months later. That's why most attempts stall: without a live connection to a proper Agreement and Financial Terms data model, extraction produces an unstructured blob that still needs a person to translate it by hand - which defeats the point.
7. The "one workflow tool" firms want isn't really one tool - it's terms treated as a first-class citizen
When we asked the group whether a single end-to-end workflow tool was desired, the answer looked emphatic: yes, almost universally. But sit with what people who onboard agreements and terms for a living actually do day to day, and a single tool starts to look less realistic. Client Services teams handling onboarding aren't just capturing terms - they're running AML checks, setting up CRM records, coordinating client reporting, and touching half a dozen other workflows that have nothing to do with financial terms at all. Ask that same tool to own agreement onboarding and the broader case management layer around it, and you've simply built another point solution that now needs integrating with everything else - the same problem in a different wrapper.
The more useful realisation from the forum wasn't "consolidate everything into one tool." It was that a best-of-breed terms solution, kept separate from broader client data and case management workflows, isn't a compromise - it's actually the right architecture. Separating concerns keeps access and ownership clean, and it means terms get treated as a first-class citizen rather than a field buried inside a generic case record: a proper calculation engine doing upfront and continuous validation against a real data model, capable of managing actual accruals and distributor payment calculations, not just capturing a rate and moving on.
Where this leaves us
Nine months of structured, peer-tested conversation with the market has a way of sharpening a roadmap. The picture that emerges isn't one of an industry lacking ambition - terms governance is disciplined, reconciliation habits are strong, and the appetite to modernise is unmistakable. What's missing is the connective tissue: a shared source of truth, a single workflow, and calculation logic firms can trust enough to stop checking twice.
That's the brief we're carrying forward. The forum itself has now wrapped after seven sessions, but the practice of listening first and building second is one we intend to continue executing on.
