2026: Where the smart money’s going and what it means for technology & data

FINBOURNE’s take on 50+ investment outlooks from the world’s largest asset managers

What we did

Every December, the big asset managers publish their year-ahead outlooks. BlackRock, Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, PIMCO, Morgan Stanley, Northern Trust, RBC, HSBC, Aviva Investors, Macquarie, Brookfield, KKR – they all weigh in on where markets are heading and where investors should put their money.

We read them. All of them. Not because we’re making investment recommendations (we’re not), but because these documents tell us something important: where the industry is going, what’s getting more complex, and what that means for the systems and data that underpin it all. This matters to our clients, and it matters to you if you are in investment management.

Here’s what we found, tell us if you disagree.

The Consensus: Six themes everyone agrees on

1. AI is still the story – but the easy money is over

Every single outlook mentions AI. No surprise. But the tone has shifted. The build-out phase (buy Nvidia, watch it go up) is giving way to an adoption phase where companies actually need to demonstrate returns on their AI investments.

BlackRock calls AI ‘the theme that keeps trumping everything else.’ But they also note that 44 of 46 AI-related stocks had drawdowns of 20% or more in 2025 – even as 19 of them still posted 20%+ annual returns. HSBC Asset Management’s outlook captures the tension: mega-cap tech now accounts for nearly 70% of US corporate profits, yet RBC warns AI capex growth will slow and could hit power-generation constraints. The era of buying the index and winning is over. This is a market that rewards those who can distinguish the real from the hype.

Making those distinctions requires granular data – not just ‘AI exposure’ but understanding whether a company runs air-cooled or liquid-cooled data centres, whether their power contracts are fixed or floating, what their chip supply dependencies look like. The winners will be those with the operational detail to see through the noise.

2. Private markets aren’t alternative anymore

This is the year private markets go mainstream. Goldman Sachs projects alternatives allocations will grow from 5% to 15-20% of institutional portfolios. Northern Trust sees ‘the era of passive beta giving way’ to more active, private-market-oriented approaches, with evergreen and continuation fund structures proliferating as managers seek permanent capital. PIMCO points to private credit’s 3.2% annual outperformance over public credit since 2000.

Semi-liquid fund structures – ELTIFs in Europe, LTAFs in the UK – are opening private markets to wealth clients and, increasingly, retail investors. Assets in these vehicles nearly tripled between 2020 and 2024, and the trajectory is accelerating.

The asset types are diversifying too: HSBC sees demand rising across smart city construction, renewable energy, and corporate financing – each with different risk profiles, documentation standards, and valuation approaches.

This expansion brings operational complexity: private assets have irregular cash flows, bespoke documentation, multiple valuation methodologies, and lifecycle events that don’t map to public market workflows. Managing them alongside liquid holdings – in a single view – is the challenge.

3. Active management is back in favour

Stock-pickers, this is your moment. When everything’s correlated, index funds win. When dispersion is high – as it is now, and as AI volatility amplifies – active managers can add real value. The outlooks are unanimous: 2026 favours selectivity.

Northern Trust declares ‘the era of passive beta’ is giving way to environments where ‘weights in indices don’t capture the productivity or valuation benefits’ of fundamental analysis. RBC Global Asset Management agrees, noting that the shift from AI capex to AI adoption will separate winners from also-rans – and only active investors positioned to understand the operational detail will capture the upside.

4. Rotate out of cash

After two years of 5%+ money market yields, every major manager says the same thing: don’t sit in cash. Rate cuts are coming (even if slowly), and reinvestment risk is real. The advice is universal: extend duration, lock in yields, get invested.

PIMCO is particularly bullish on bonds, calling them ‘compelling’ relative to equities. RBC projects high single-digit fixed income returns for 2026 as rates normalise.

And for investors in complex structures, even assessing the cash you think you have isn’t straightforward anymore. When your portfolio includes private credit with lock-ups, infrastructure with capital calls, semi-liquid funds with redemption gates, and assets posted as collateral or otherwise encumbered, forecasting available liquidity becomes a treasury management challenge – and a data problem in its own right.

5. Infrastructure is the new fixed income

If there’s one asset class everyone loves, it’s infrastructure. AI power demand, grid modernisation, energy transition, reshoring – it all requires massive capital investment. Macquarie Asset Management projects 10% annual returns in 2026, with utilities entering what they call a ‘capex super-cycle’. Asia alone will see infrastructure investment grow from $1.61 trillion to $2.22 trillion by 2030.

Brookfield’s 2026 outlook calls this a ‘once-in-a-generation investment supercycle’, driven by the convergence of digitalization, decarbonization, and deglobalization. They project global infrastructure investment needs will exceed $100 trillion by 2040. KKR has committed $50 billion to data centre and power infrastructure through their partnership with Energy Capital Partners, noting that ‘the surge in AI demand isn’t just stretching infrastructure – it’s rewriting the blueprint for how it needs to be built.’

Northern Trust correctly positions infrastructure as a real asset class, ie with inflation protection that often contractually holds value when costs rise. RBC highlights Germany’s infrastructure and defence spending as a key driver of European growth in 2026.

These aren’t simple equity positions. Infrastructure assets have inflation-linked revenue streams, complex debt structures, external cash flow dependencies, and multi-decade investment horizons. Modelling them properly – and integrating them into a portfolio view alongside liquid holdings – requires purpose-built capabilities.

6. Real assets for inflation hedging

Related to infrastructure but broader: real assets are positioned as the hedge against persistent inflation. Gold, commodities, real estate with pricing power – these are back in vogue as rates drop again and central banks maintain elevated liquidity.

HSBC’s ‘diversify the diversifiers’ message captures the shift: with government bonds less reliable as portfolio ballast, alternatives and real assets take on a new role in risk management. Northern Trust expects inflation to remain above 3% with significant tail risks, making inflation protection a portfolio necessity rather than a nice-to-have.

The outliers: What could go wrong

Consensus is comfortable but dangerous. Here’s where some managers break from the pack:

JP Morgan’s ‘Metaverse moment’ warning

Michael Cembalest’s ‘Smothering Heights’ outlook asks what happens if AI capex doesn’t deliver returns. He draws parallels to Meta’s metaverse pivot – billions spent, sentiment collapsed, stock halved. The difference now is the numbers are much bigger. If hyperscaler earnings disappoint, the correction could be severe. If there is a correction, the winners won’t disappear – they’ll just become easier to identify. Another argument for active management.

Morgan Stanley’s ‘creative destruction’ call

Mike Wilson remains cautious on crowded trades. His message: when everyone owns the same things, small shifts in sentiment create outsized moves. He’s watching for the ‘creative destruction’ that shakes out weak hands. Their view reinforces the active management thesis: when the tide goes out, you need to know what you own – across every sector, not just the ones that were winning.

PIMCO’s private credit stress test

While bullish on bonds, PIMCO warns that private credit’s rapid growth has created pockets of risk. Not all private lending is created equal, and some structures may face stress as rates stay higher for longer.

Bridgewater’s debt sustainability concern

Ray Dalio and Bridgewater have been increasingly vocal about US debt sustainability. With interest payments now exceeding $1.1 trillion annually and the debt-to-GDP ratio at approximately 120%, they warn of a potential ‘debt death spiral’ where higher yields increase servicing costs, requiring more borrowing, which in turn pushes yields higher. Their concern isn’t about a single catalyst but about the compounding nature of fiscal imbalance – what Dalio calls a potential ‘financial heart attack’. If you are rotating into bonds, maybe think about how much duration you are taking on..

Aviva Investors’ AI-driven inflation warning

Aviva Investors identifies AI-driven inflation as 2026’s most overlooked risk. Their logic: massive AI infrastructure investment creates supply bottlenecks – Deutsche Bank projects $4 trillion in data-centre capex by 2030 – that could push up prices faster than productivity gains offset them. If inflation surprises to the upside, central banks may not just pause rate cuts but could be forced to hike again. Markets aren’t pricing this scenario.

What this means for technology and data

Strip away the investment advice and these outlooks reveal something else: operational complexity is exploding.

Dispersion rewards data quality

When individual positions diverge sharply, you need to know exactly what you own, how it’s priced, and where your risk sits – not just market risk, but liquidity risk, counterparty risk, concentration risk, and the operational risks embedded in complex structures. You need data rich enough to slice exposures by geography, sector, instrument type, counterparty, and a dozen other dimensions. The AI data granularity we mentioned earlier – air-cooled vs. liquid-cooled, power contract terms, supply chain dependencies – is just one example. The active management renaissance requires an operational foundation that can support it.

Private markets can’t be shoehorned into public markets infrastructure

Public market systems don’t handle private asset idiosyncrasies. You can’t fudge them in either. You still end up cobbling the risk views together outside the system; and processing lifecycle events outside the system; and reporting outside the system. The time for tolerating that latency is over. There is only one tenable answer – infrastructure that’s built to run public volume and breadth combined with private depth.

Shared data beats duplicated effort

Here’s something the outlooks don’t mention but we think about constantly: the investment chain runs on data, but that data is fragmented. When an asset manager runs one system and their administrator runs another, every position gets reconciled twice. Every corporate action gets processed twice. And when the underlying data isn’t rich enough – when it lacks the granularity to support the calculations, workflows, and risk views that complex portfolios require – no amount of reconciliation helps. The answer isn’t just eliminating duplication. It’s building on a foundation where data is rich, connected, and capable of supporting whatever the portfolio throws at it.

What we’re building

FINBOURNE exists to solve these problems. Our investment data management platform is designed for a world where public and private sit in the same portfolio, where instruments are complex, and where data is rich and needs to flow across organisations without friction.

A few things we’re focused on for 2026:

Private markets, properly. Not as a bolt-on. As a first-class citizen in the data model. Complex instruments, flexible valuations, full lifecycle support – ready for the evergreen and semi-liquid structures that Northern Trust and others see proliferating.

Collateral and liquidity management. As private credit expands and margin requirements tighten, understanding what you can pledge, what’s encumbered, and what cash is actually available – across lock-ups, notice periods, and redemption gates – becomes critical. We’re building the tools to see the whole picture.

AI with governance. We bring practical AI capabilities to investment operations – with the audit trails, explainability, and controls that regulated firms actually need. Because ‘move fast and break things’ doesn’t work when the thing you might break is someone’s pension.

Cost reduction through shared infrastructure. When your administrator runs on FINBOURNE and you run on FINBOURNE, the reconciliation problem goes away. That’s not a pitch; that’s arithmetic. If your admin runs Geneva, and your hedge fund runs Geneva, is it different?

The bottom line

The 2026 outlooks from BlackRock to Brookfield to Macquarie describe a world that’s more complex, more dispersed, and more demanding than ever. Private markets going mainstream. Active management in favour. AI everywhere but under pressure to prove ROI. Infrastructure investment at generational scale. And, as Aviva Investors and Bridgewater warn in different ways, risks that markets may be underpricing.

Every one of those trends creates operational challenges. And operational challenges, ultimately, are data challenges. That’s where we come in.

Written by: Gus Sekhon (VP of Strategy) & Elliot Hurdiss (Head of Client Implementation Group)