What makes one firm’s asset management product lineup stand out from another’s? Fee compression has pulled expense ratios lower and lower, a decline that is only flattening as the cheapest funds approach zero. Each firm’s product lineup now covers the same asset classes with broadly similar strategies. Performance still matters for active strategies, but within any given category, a number of funds will post comparable returns, and every firm will have winners and losers within a given timeframe. So with cost and performance no longer sufficient differentiators, fund issuers must make the case for their products on other terms.
Enter the advisor platform. As products become increasingly similar, the asset manager’s advisor website becomes the biggest differentiator. These advisor platforms began as product catalogs housing fund profiles, fact sheets and performance tables to support advisor research. Today, these sites must function as a product storefront that goes far beyond performance and fees, with marketing and education that differentiates firms on expertise, investment approach and practice support.
In Corporate Insight’s asset management research, we’ve seen this digital shift clearly. As part of our ongoing research, we categorized every website change over a 12-month review period to reveal strategic priorities across the industry. Over that period ending in September 2025, asset management firms made 1,031 changes to their advisor sites. Marketing- and content-oriented categories saw the vast majority of changes, while Investment Capabilities was the single busiest subcategory, reflecting a broad effort to rebuild how firms market their product offerings rather than simply refreshing the pages already in place.
Despite this investment, no firm has yet perfected the new-gen asset management interface. As firms add marketing and education pages, they must also rebuild existing site architecture to include these new areas while still preserving the fund-level information that advisors rely on. That tension appears most clearly in site navigation. When CI surveys advisors, they rank navigation as the least important element yet complain about it more than anything else. It’s a pattern CI has seen time and again: Good navigation is both unnoticed and unappreciated, while poor navigation sinks the entire experience.
Hanging over all of it is AI: 87% of advisors already use tools like ChatGPT or Claude, yet most issuer sites still treat AI as a topic to explain rather than a capability to offer or optimize for, held back by compliance concerns, development cost and, likely, the simple fact that firms are still busy building the storefront itself.
Our new report, The Asset Manager Website as a Product Storefront, examines all these issues, tracking how asset manager websites have evolved from product catalogs to marketing and education platforms. Below, we’ll preview two key findings from this research:
Marketing content leads a year of advisor site changes, marking a measurable pivot and focus
Our pace-of-change tracking found one overwhelming area of focus for asset management platforms: From September 2024 to September 2025, asset management firms concentrated overwhelmingly on the public-facing advisor storefront.
Of 1,031 advisor site changes tracked, the marketing- and content-oriented categories accounted for 902 of these changes; support, notifications and self-service drew just 65 combined.
Promotions & Information led with 236 changes. Within it, Investment Capabilities was the top subcategory, at 100 updates, most of medium significance, as firms rebuilt how they position asset classes rather than refreshing pages. About Us page overhauls (captured in the Firm Information & Services subcategory, at 49 updates) ranked second.
Marketing the active case with potential for outperformance
Just over two-thirds of advisors are more likely to choose an active ETF than a passive one. Firms have noticed and are rebuilding ETF pages around this preference, with several repositioning their vehicle capabilities pages around active management in 2025.
Trading flexibility, tax efficiency and low costs each appear in 76% of ETF positionings, but all three belong to the wrapper rather than to the manager: Active and passive ETFs share them. Firms have also turned to highlighting outperformance, a claim most passive funds cannot make. Claims of outperformance appeared in 56% of positionings in CI’s 2024 review, rising to 76% in August 2026.
Although returns-based messaging invites scrutiny of actual results, firms notably manage that risk through careful positioning. Many ETF pages frame outperformance as a potential outcome of active management rather than a guarantee. Firms therefore position that possibility as a defining feature of the active ETF, letting them highlight outperformance as a benefit without having to defend a specific track record.
T. Rowe Price demonstrates this messaging in its most explicit form. The hero section on its Exchange Traded Funds page credits portfolio managers with finding market signals others miss, then says those signals are designed to help clients outperform the index. Convenience, cost effectiveness and tax efficiency appear only folded into that claim, and the lineup lists every ETF by name, ticker and category while withholding returns entirely. The firm builds its ETF lineup’s case entirely around active management rather than the wrapper itself.
For more on CI’s asset management research and how to access The Asset Manager Website as a Product Storefront, contact CI. And visit our Insights section for more on the latest trends in financial services, insurance, and healthcare.