Attracting investor flows through customer data

For decades, Meta, Alphabet and others have mined customer data to sell ads and other products to business customers. But little did I know that asset management firms can increase investor flows by mining their customer data. And I am not talking about the data from existing customers, but from people visiting their websites.

Marco Zanotti analysed the websites of US funds and asset management firms and the kind of technologies they employ to harvest customer data from each visit. These can be simple data points like the IP address (and hence location) of the visitor to A/B-testing different website designs, to more complex data sets and dynamic websites built based on the data collected from the visitor.

The idea is that if you dynamically adapt a website to the type of visitor looking at it, you can focus the information presented to the visitor on the elements that make the fund more attractive and create a nudge to contact the fund manager.

And clearly this seems to work, because in the 12 months after a fund manager introduced such data mining technologies on their website, net inflows in the funds increased by an average 1.5% of AUM, with most of these flows coming from retail investors.

Net inflows increase after fund managers introduce data analysis on their websites

Source: Zanotti (2025)

However, there is a caveat. Obviously, there is a diminishing return on investment. Installing more and more data analytics tools will bring less and less in additional flows. But more importantly, most of the inflows go to first movers in the industry. The chart below shows that the size of net inflows declines if a larger share of a fund’s competitors also uses data analytics tools on their website.

Effect of competition

Source: Zanotti (2025)

This indicates two things.

First, introducing data analytics tools and optimising the webpage to attract customers has, over time, moved from being a competitive advantage to a must-have just to keep up with the competition (and prevent losing ground to peers).

Second, we are in the middle of a new technology emerging that allows for new ways to analyse customer behaviour: AI. I think asset managers need to think about how they can use AI to analyse customer data and use that to attract investors.