Third-party management companies and host ACDs are all the same, aren't they? It's a common assumption, and one that can cost a fund manager dearly if left unchallenged.

In this episode, Wayne is joined by Giles Swan: public policy and regulatory consultant, former UK financial regulator with 25 years of international experience across investment services, digital assets, and payments: to unpack the role of host ACDs and management companies: the central service providers responsible for a fund's investment management, marketing, and administration, yet almost invisible from a brand perspective.

They explore why a portfolio manager, despite coming up with the idea and choosing the ACD or Manco, ends up delegating investment management to the very entity they appointed. They get into why reputational risk sits squarely with this choice, since poor administration or service can undermine a fund regardless of investment performance. They discuss what actually differentiates providers in a selection process: jurisdictional reach, service quality, business model, ownership, and cultural fit, and why price should rarely be the first consideration. They also cover why growth plans, regulatory support, and existing relationships with custodians or administrators matter as much as the headline pitch, and why a lengthy RFP process across every provider in the market is rarely the most efficient way to reach a good decision.

The throughline: they are not all the same, and getting this choice right is foundational to how smoothly the rest of the business runs.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package

You don't own your audience. Your distributors do. So what exactly is a distribution strategy meant to achieve?

In this episode, Wayne and Gareth get into the practical mechanics of building a distribution strategy from the ground up: starting with the two things every portfolio manager needs to define before anything else: what the fund actually does, and who it's really for. They unpack why "our target market is everyone" doesn't survive contact with an actual marketing plan, how to build out three to five genuine client personas rather than one vague catch-all, and why a fund that works for retail doesn't automatically mean it works for institutions: but rarely the reverse.

They explore why messaging matters more than performance in isolation, because performance without context just invites comparison on cost and numbers alone, and why fund groups so rarely tell investors when a fund won't perform well, even though professional buyers consistently ask for exactly that honesty. They also dig into the difference between portfolio managers as people (rarely natural communicators) and portfolio managers as businesses (responsible for turning that into the right message), why platform listings come down to governance and demand rather than performance alone, why chasing likes and views is the wrong metric compared to building real authority and trust, and why something as unglamorous as a wrong OCF on a factsheet can quietly undo months of awareness-building.

The throughline: distribution isn't something that happens to you: even without owning your audience, there's real, meaningful work to be done to influence how they find you.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package

Nine out of 10 portfolio managers' marketing is terrible. If that sounds harsh, ask yourself whether you could name three funds off the top of your head. Most people can't name one.

In this episode, Gareth is joined by Giles Swan: public policy and regulatory consultant, former UK financial regulator with 25 years of international experience across investment services, digital assets, and payments, to unpack why fund marketing so rarely moves beyond a monthly fact sheet, a conference presentation, and a portfolio manager on a podcast.

They explore why funds lean on the name of the manager or the brand of the management company instead of building a real narrative for the product itself. They get into why "professional investors only" often becomes an excuse to avoid retail-facing marketing that the content reaches anyway, and how compliance teams can release the handbrake on creative, plain-language communication without stepping outside the rules. They discuss why fund communications are so often overweighted on risk disclosure at the expense of explaining the actual outcome, and what the FCA's Consumer Composite Investments regime signals about the direction regulators want the industry to move. They also look at what fund managers can genuinely learn from crypto marketing — a higher-risk asset class that somehow communicates more clearly, more concisely, and more engagingly than most funds manage to.

The throughline: don't rely on performance alone, and don't forget the top of the funnel: awareness has to come before conversion.

Whether you're rethinking a fund's naming and narrative or trying to get compliance and marketing pulling in the same direction, this episode is a useful reset on what fund marketing could actually look like.

If you want to understand where your model sits and what it needs to work harder on, the Roadmap to £10bn package is the place to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package