The Hidden Risk in U.S. Equity Markets: Why Foreign Investors May Pull Back in 2026
While American investors celebrated strong portfolio returns in 2025—16.4% from the S&P 500 plus exceptional international gains—few recognized a troubling undercurrent: foreign investors experienced vastly different results from U.S. equities. The dollar’s 9.4% decline transformed what domestic investors saw as a solid year into a disappointment for international allocators. This reversal from 2024’s dynamics could…
Read MoreModern Investment Operations Demand Modern Data Infrastructure—Moving Beyond Manual Reconciliation
A Top 30 U.S. Asset Owner recently discovered that its most significant operational risk was not in the markets but in its data. With 33 managers, multiple custodians, and both public and private assets, the organization was struggling to trust the numbers it relied on to make billion-dollar decisions. When Data Becomes a Bottleneck The…
Read MoreThis Year, We Decided to be Bolder
This year, we decided to be bolder. Not by shouting louder, but by saying clearly what our clients have been proving for years: the right analytics and calculator engine can turn a complex financial product into a firm’s fastest-growing franchise. When that happens, technology stops being necessary infrastructure and becomes a core driver of sales,…
Read MoreHow One Insurance Giant Transformed Tax Deferral Conversations Into Wins
A top-10 global insurance provider with $11.8 billion in assets faced a persistent challenge: its advisors couldn’t effectively demonstrate the value of tax-deferred annuities to prospects. Despite having competitive products, they were spending too much time explaining them to their clients because complex tax benefits remained abstract concepts rather than concrete, personalized advantages. Each custom…
Read MoreModular Implementation: Why Financial Firms Should Rethink Technology Transformation
The disappointing truth about technological transformation in financial services is that most major implementations fail—not because the technology doesn’t work, but because organizations try to change everything at once. We’ve been working with a client to implement new analytics capabilities, but thanks to FinMason’s modularity, the implementation was neither lengthy nor difficult. They needed roughly…
Read MoreThe Challenge Every Asset Owner Needs to Address
The portfolio data chaos problem is a challenge that too many asset owners face. Too many asset owners spend too much time managing data in spreadsheets rather than making investment decisions. Our industry is using a program created in 1985 in a technology universe that is accelerating at light speed. We’re implementing AI everywhere while still…
Read MoreA Historic Shift in Global Equity Markets: Q3 2025 Capital Market Assumptions
As we close out the third quarter of 2025, FinMason’s latest Capital Market Assumptions reveal a watershed moment in global equity markets—one that should fundamentally reshape how investors think about portfolio construction and geographic diversification. A Ten-Year First: North American Equities Below 2% For the first time since we began running our long-term linear regression…
Read MoreThe Success of Your AI Initiative Depends on Clean Data
Financial services have embraced AI. Every week, more news emerges about the implementation of LLMs, machine learning algorithms that select stocks, natural language processing that generates investment commentary, and predictive analytics that forecast market movements. It’s exciting stuff, and the promises are genuinely transformative. We often learn that for many firms, AI implementation is still…
Read MoreSpeed Matters: How Modern APIs Are Transforming Financial Analytics
The financial services industry needs speed. We can execute trades in microseconds, but it still takes weeks to implement basic portfolio analytics. We can move billions of dollars instantly across continents, yet struggle to generate a simple risk report without waiting for overnight batch processes. This contradiction is a competitive liability. The Legacy Trap Many…
Read MoreReady for 2026? Plan Your Digital & Analytics Initiatives
As we look ahead to 2026, investing in digital and analytics capabilities strategically, efficiently, and with genuine impact is crucial. Success isn’t solely dependent on a large technology budget; it is more important to think modularly about your analytics infrastructure, focusing resources on what truly differentiates your firm, while partnering strategically for everything else. The…
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