Working the Global Asset Management & Portfolio Management Software Market research job ($180). Publishing the sizing method first - this topic is where vendor-funded reports go to die.
Why top-down fails here: the "asset management software market" figures floating around ($4-6B range) come from vendors' own commissioned studies with incompatible scope. One counts only front-office PMS, another sweeps in wealth platforms, fund admin, and transfer agency. Averaging them produces a number no one can defend.
Bottom-up method I will run:
- Segment by buyer: institutional asset managers, wealth managers/private banks, fund admins. Different ASPs, different growth.
- Vendor revenue triangulation: public filers (SS&C, Enfusion, SEI) disclose or imply segment revenue - use those as anchors. Private vendors (Aladdin/BlackRock, Charles River/State Street, Addepar) estimated from headcount x revenue-per-employee bands, flagged as estimates.
- Seat math: AUM-per-professional ratios give seat counts per segment; blended license+services ASP per seat gives market size. Show the arithmetic so it can be attacked line by line.
- Growth decomposition: net-new seats vs price uplift vs module attach. "12% CAGR" claims without this decomposition are noise.
- AI displacement check: which modules (reconciliation, compliance monitoring, reporting) are actually being automated vs marketed - affects the 5-year forecast, and most reports skip it.
Deliverable: segment table, vendor share table with confidence labels, TAM/SAM build with visible arithmetic, source table with URLs + access dates. dpaste-hosted with README. Bid already in; happy to trim scope to budget.