By: Natalie Johnson
At most asset management firms, no single team owns the client relationship. Prospecting sits with one team, onboarding with another, and relationship management with a third, each running its own systems, its own metrics, and its own private definition of success. The client, meanwhile, experiences none of those divisions. They experience one continuous relationship, and most of the friction in it lives precisely where the internal boundaries fall. Victoria Savio, who has built product ownership discipline inside financial services, argues that the fix is structural rather than technical: one leader accountable for the entire client lifecycle, from the first request for proposal (RFP) conversation through onboarding and into ongoing relationship management. Her case is not that firms are building bad tools. It is that nobody with real authority is looking at the whole experience and asking whether it works.
The Seams Nobody Owns
Functional ownership produces a specific failure mode, and Savio names it precisely. “When ownership is split by function, everyone can point to their own piece and say it’s working, and the client still has a bad experience, because nobody owns the seams between the pieces,” she says. “Those seams are where the real friction lives.” The arithmetic of client memory is unforgiving here. “A new client who had a smooth RFP process and then a rocky onboarding doesn’t remember the RFP fondly; they just remember the rocky onboarding.”
That asymmetry matters more than most firms account for, because the handoff points are exactly what no team is measured on. Sales reports on wins. Onboarding reports on completion. Relationship management reports on retention. Each dashboard shows green while the client accumulates a running impression of an organization that cannot get out of its own way. Committees do not solve this, and Savio has watched enough of them try. “I’ve watched firms try to solve this with a committee or a working group, and it doesn’t work, because nobody in the room owns the consequence of a bad decision.” Her prescription is blunt: pick one person accountable for the whole outcome, and give them real authority to make the call.
The Budget Problem Behind The Experience Problem
There is a second, quieter force at work, and it explains why client-facing infrastructure degrades even at well-run firms. The investor portal, the customer relationship management system, and the onboarding system – none of these is what the client is buying. “Nobody is paying specifically for those. They’re paying for investment performance,” Savio says. “So this part of the business doesn’t get the attention or the investment that a revenue-generating product would, even though it’s the thing shaping whether a client’s day-to-day experience feels effortless or frustrating.” Absent a profit-and-loss line of its own, this category of work lives on whatever budget survives after the revenue priorities are funded.
The gap between that funding logic and the client’s lived reality is the whole problem. “For the client, often that portal or that onboarding experience is the relationship day to day,” Savio says. Which means the argument for investment has to be made in the language the business already responds to, not in the language of user experience. She frames it as retention, referrals, and the cost of the friction nobody is measuring. Good product leadership, in her account, “means being able to make the client-experience case in terms the business actually responds to, and to hold that line even when it’s uncomfortable.” That is a commercial argument, not an aesthetic one, and leaders who cannot make it will keep losing the budget fight to whatever has a cleaner return attached.
What Business Fluency Buys You
Savio has spent the majority of her career within sales and distribution rather than in technology or a formal product function, which gives her a close view of how these systems are used. “I understand what the technology is actually for, because I’ve lived on the side of the business that has to use it,” she says. “I’ve sat in sales and distribution long enough to know what a good day looks like for the people working inside these systems, and what makes them quietly stop using a tool six months after launch.” That last detail is the tell. Abandonment rarely announces itself. It happens gradually, invisibly, months after the launch has already been declared a success.
Her diagnosis of why technology initiatives fail follows directly from that vantage point, and it should unsettle anyone who thinks the problem is exclusively an engineering challenge. “Most AI and technology initiatives don’t fail because the architecture was wrong. They fail because the business problem never got translated into something specific enough to build against, or because adoption was treated as an afterthought instead of part of the plan from day one.” The role she describes for herself is the translation point between what the business needs and what the build team can act on. It is unglamorous work, and firms that skip it pay for the omission twice: once in the build and again in the quiet non-adoption that follows.
Savio also pushes back on the assumption that governance is a tax on speed. Her view inverts it: to move faster, clear ownership and key performance indicators (KPIs) are essential. “When you have clear ownership and clear KPIs from the start, you move faster later, not slower, because you’re not re-litigating decisions every quarter.” She built a data product ownership function for exactly this reason: she needed a clear view of where things were breaking down. “Governance and KPIs aren’t paperwork; they’re how you find the truth about what’s working.” For infrastructure that sits outside the revenue story, that discipline is the only thing standing between a working client experience and one that stays invisible until a client finally complains. By then, the seam has already done its damage.
Follow Victoria Savio on LinkedIn for more insights on product ownership, client lifecycle management, and AI adoption in financial services.
