U.S. Product Development 2025
Building Across Competing Priorities
Future-Proof Product Initiatives
- Explore market sizing and pricing trends for various investment vehicles, including mutual funds, money market funds, exchange-traded funds, and closed-end funds
- Discover best practices for the product organizational structure
- Understand the priority placed by product organizations on incorporation of ESG/SRI principles into investment products
- Make informed product development and management decisions using end-investor and advisor demographic and attribute data
- Evaluate the expansion of product lines in new vehicle structures, with a focus on exchange-traded funds (ETFs) and the choice of active ETF structures
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Summary
Examine the complex U.S. product landscape for institutional and retail client segments, with special focus on financial advisor product use. Understand how advisors are using active and passive, which investment vehicles they prefer, and how they allocate client assets across asset classes/strategies.
A Note from the Author
The Five Strategic Priorities Ahead For Investment Product Development Teams in 2026
Daniil Shapiro, CFA
Director
Bio →
Daniil Shapiro, CFA
Director
Daniil is a Director in Cerulli’s Product Development practice, which focuses on trends related to asset managers’ product strategy, development, and management functions. This broadly includes assessing the opportunity for product line expansion, evaluating emerging product trends, assessing optimal pricing strategy, and understanding distribution and product positioning for investment products across retail and institutional channels.
Relying on industry surveys and interviews with a wide variety of industry stakeholders, Daniil seeks to deliver insights through Cerulli’s published research, consulting engagements, and presentations.
Full biography here.
As product development executives build out their 2026 priorities, Cerulli believes these five key tenets can help guide decision-making:
- Active ETFs are an immediate opportunity that can be addressed via new product launches. Nearly all managers that offer ETF product view the ETF structure as a large opportunity (96%), as the industry continues to focus on developing and distributing active ETF product.
- Dual-share-class ETF product is most likely to be pursued in unique situations and by a narrower range of firms than the hefty list of firms filing for exemptive relief, often for testing of what can be achieved.
- The provision of private capital solutions to a retail investor base will be a long-running industry theme, with the interval and tender offer fund structures taking center stage for distribution. 65% of managers that offer interval fund product perceive a large distribution opportunity for the structure, and 87% of those building new product plan to offer brand new strategies via the structure.
- The private markets in DC plans opportunity, while meaningful, will take a long-term effort to pay dividends for managers. Managers should evaluate partnerships and support efforts, but with the understanding that the effort will take five to 10 years to gather traction.
- While tokenization is likely to receive tremendous attention in coming years, it will be a long-term initiative beyond the most obvious use cases that result in efficiency improvements and cost savings.
For a complete guidebook the U.S. product landscape, access The Cerulli Report—U.S. Product Development 2025. Gain insight into advisor use of investment vehicles, top product development initiatives for asset managers, and more.
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