Hedge funds and other large financial firms are being pushed to adopt new technology because of the pandemic, but the firms still have a ways to go before they are up to speed, according to Eric Bernstein, president of asset management solutions for Broadridge, a global fintech firm based in New York City.

“There is still a tremendous amount of work to be done” by hedge funds and other large asset managers before the firms will be able to access information as quickly and accurately as possible and pass it along to clients, Bernstein said.

In the last decade, firms put together a host of technologies to accomplish their goals, keeping and upgrading the best-of-breed software and hardware. “Now they are looking at how to modernize those technologies,” Bernstein said. “They are getting there, but they are not there yet.”

Broadridge surveyed 500 c-suite executives from firms ranging in size from $1 billion in assets under management to more than $500 billion in AUM to see how they want to build on their technology and issued the findings in “The ABCDs of Innovation.” In addition to hedge funds, the survey included firms such as commercial and investment banks, insurance companies, asset and wealth managers.

Sixty percent of the firm executives said they will accelerate their move to cloud services to improve flexibility, and 47% said they will increase their investments in technology that enables digital interaction as a result of the pandemic, according to the report. Digital interaction includes employee and client experiences, workflow and operations.

At the same time, 91% said digital interaction technology will be the most important technology in adapting to the pandemic’s aftermath over the next two years, and 73% said digital interaction technology was the most beneficial technology in dealing with the immediate impact of the pandemic.

At the time of the survey, in the second quarter of 2020, two-thirds of the firms were at least halfway through implementing cloud technologies, the survey showed. Most said cloud technology, AI and digital interaction technology provided benefits during the first months of the pandemic.

A lot of hedge funds and other large firms are heavily invested in the status quo for technology but there is “a lot of bubble gum and tape” holding things together, Bernstein said. “Companies now want to know how to do things faster and at the push of a button.”

Clients are more sophisticated and demanding now and they want information tailored to them specifically, and they want to know why something was done, not just what was done. New technology is amazingly fast and can provide those services as the large firms progress, he said.