The asset management and asset servicing transformation playbook: Key takeaways from our Dublin executive evening

Last week, FINBOURNE brought together senior leaders from across the fund administration and asset servicing community in Dublin for an evening of candid, peer-level conversation. The evening featured three sessions: a panel moderated by industry consultant Fergus McKeon, bringing together FINBOURNE Chairman Toby Glaysher and CEO Tom McHugh; a fireside chat in which Tom turned interviewer, sitting down with Joan Kehoe, Founder and CEO of Alchelyst; and a closing conversation with rugby legend Brian O’Driscoll on leading through pressure, an off-the-record session that, by all accounts, left a lasting impression on everyone in the room. The discussions ranged from the realities of platform modernisation to the promise and complexity of AI and what it truly takes to build something new in an industry defined by legacy.

The uncomfortable truth about transformation

FINBOURNE Chairman Toby Glaysher opened with a sobering reality check: according to McKinsey, the success rate for large-scale data and digital transformation projects sits somewhere between 14% and 16%. The question, as Fergus put it, is not whether to modernise. It is how not to get it wrong.
Toby outlined four tests he would apply to any transformation project: an honest assessment of track record to date; the build versus buy decision; having the right leadership and talent in place, business-led, not tech-led; and crucially, getting the scope right. “If you are going out to try and build the thing that solves all of your problems,” he said, “I could probably guess where that is going to end up.”
FINBOURNE CEO Tom McHugh brought it back to people. Execution breaks down, he argued, when organisations cannot find individuals who both understand the history of their systems and have the vision to imagine something fundamentally simpler. “The people who tend to know the history tend to be constrained by it.” Finding someone who can do both, and who is also driven, is in his words extraordinarily rare.

Platform modernisation: stop waiting, start doing

Tom identified two common failure modes when it comes to sequencing modernisation. The first is the big bang project that tries to solve everything at once, almost guaranteed to fail. The second is the rudderless agile approach that drifts without a clear target. The answer lies somewhere between the two: a defined vision, genuine agile discipline, and above all, honest retrospectives. “If you build the right team with the right level of honesty, you’ll be able to take care of most of it.”
Both Tom and Toby were unequivocal on pace. “I haven’t seen any organisation in the last 12 months where I would say they’re going too fast on AI,” said Toby. “I’ve seen just about every organisation where I would say they’re going too slow.” Tom’s advice to industry peers was equally direct: stop waiting. “Everything you do today will be wrong, guaranteed. But you still have to start doing it today.”

AI: Get the foundations right, then move fast

The conversation on AI was nuanced. Tom described three areas where firms are getting immediate, defensible value today: research and document analysis, complex task automation such as setting up a fund from a 150-page prospectus in minutes rather than weeks, and AI as a last line of defence for data quality, continuously improving the rules it runs against.
But the message was equally clear on what not to do. “You should never, or at least not for a very long time, let it make decisions,” said Tom. Toby’s test was simple: if a regulator knocks on your door and asks what happened, do you have the tracing infrastructure to answer? If not, don’t use it.
The harder, less-discussed risk? As AI takes over more routine work, are we still training people who can spot when it goes wrong?

Building new: Joan Kehoe’s story

Perhaps the most compelling perspective of the evening came from Joan Kehoe, Founder and CEO of Alchelyst. After four decades in fund administration, including transforming the alternatives business at JP Morgan, Joan chose to build again from scratch, this time on a cloud-native, API-first technology stack.
The decision was not straightforward. Her team were more comfortable with familiar legacy platforms, and the industry was too. “We said: if we’re going to make this work, we have to be brave.” The bet has paid off. Alchelyst recently closed a merger with Lyra, with a major institutional investor as its anchor client.
For Joan, the lesson is clear: “Keep innovating and just keep moving, because if you stand still with where I think the industry is going, you’re screwed.”

It was, as one attendee put it, an evening that will be hard to forget.