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

It's easier to market an EU fund in the UK than a domestic one. If that sounds backwards, you haven't yet gone through the regulatory puzzle that sits underneath every new fund launch.

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 part of fund launches that gets far less attention than the investment pitch: the regulatory structure.

Before a manager gets anywhere near investors, they have to answer two deceptively simple questions: what is the fund going to do, and who is it for. Those answers determine everything from USITS versus non-USITS eligibility to whether real estate or private credit can even be held in the vehicle.

They explore why the temptation to give a fund the broadest possible investment remit backfires the moment a regulator asks for genuine specificity. They cover how the Overseas Funds Regime has changed the economics of distributing an EU USITS into the UK post-Brexit, turning what was once free under temporary permissions into a cost that includes a UK financial promotion approver. They get into why "no regulator is just checking boxes," and what the FCA actually digs into on model portfolios, stress testing, and target market. They also unpack how value and cost are assessed differently in the UK versus the EU's undue costs regime, and why a higher fee demands active justification rather than a better track record alone. And they look at what regulators check beyond the product itself: the firm, the people, and the delegation arrangements behind it.

Whether you're structuring a fund for the first time or reassessing how an existing one is distributed, getting this right is the foundation everything else in the Roadmap to £10bn is built on.

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

If your advisers, your platform, and your funds are all under the same roof, do you still need a distribution strategy? The answer might surprise you.

In this episode, Wayne and Gareth tackle a topic that often gets overlooked in conversations about fund growth: the vertically integrated model. The assumption is simple: if the money is already in the building, why worry about distribution? But as Wayne and Gareth quickly unpack, having a captive audience doesn't mean the hard work disappears. It just changes shape.

They explore why the justification for putting investors into internally manufactured funds actually needs to be more robust than for external funds, not less, how conflicts of interest within vertically integrated models have to be actively managed through governance, documentation, and independent oversight, why the unfair advantage of knowing your end client better than anyone else is only valuable if you use it well, what happens when consolidators bring multiple funds with overlapping strategies into the same group, and how to navigate that without harming investors.

Whether you're a standalone asset manager or part of a larger integrated group, the Roadmap to £10bn is as relevant to you as it is to anyone trying to scale.

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

Most fund managers treat their investment objective as a legal formality. What if it's actually one of your most powerful growth tools?

In this episode, Wayne and Gareth go head to head on a seemingly dry but surprisingly contentious question: do a fund's investment objectives and policies directly drive its growth?

What starts as a disagreement quickly uncovers something most fund managers overlook: that the words used to describe what a fund does carry far more commercial weight than most people realise.

They dig into why the FCA has been pushing for greater clarity in fund documentation and what that means for how funds are bought and sold, how EU-domiciled funds entering the UK market under the OFR regime compare to their UK counterparts, and whether looser documentation is actually an advantage or a liability, why professional buyers see straight through vague or overly flexible strategies, and how the importance of a well-crafted objective shifts at different stages of a fund's life cycle, from launch through to institutional scale.

It's a conversation that moves from legal technicality to commercial reality, and by the end, Wayne and Gareth land somewhere neither quite expected.

If your fund's objective was written to satisfy compliance rather than to win allocations, this episode might change how you think about it.

And if you want to audit every element of your fund's positioning, not just the paperwork, The Roadmap to £10bn package is where to start: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package

What do UK fund buyers really want, and why do so many funds that look right on paper still fail to win allocations?

In this debut episode, Zeyro co-founders Wayne Green and Gareth Malna lay the foundations of The Roadmap to £10bn by unpacking the three forces that sit behind almost every fund buying decision in the UK market: timing, clarity, and credibility.

This isn't about getting a meeting. It's about understanding what's actually happening in the room once you're in one, and what quietly kills a deal long before an RFP ever lands.

Wayne and Gareth dig into why passive funds are dominating allocations and what that means for active managers trying to compete, how the shift away from individual decision-making towards committee-driven, DDQ-heavy processes has changed the game, why new and smaller funds aren't necessarily at a disadvantage, but need a very different approach, and how the best-performing funds aren't always the ones attracting the most capital.

If you've ever wondered why interest doesn't convert into allocation, or why a fund that should be scaling simply isn't, this episode is your starting point.

And if you want to turn what you hear into a structured plan for your own fund, The Roadmap to £10bn package sets out exactly how to do that: https://www.zeyro.one/roadmap-to-10bn-package