Most asset managers believe they are becoming more agile, and in many ways, they are right. New strategies launch faster, mandates close, and client retention holds. The metrics firms use to track this progress measure internal efficiency well, but say very little about competitive position.

Consider a common example: a credit opportunity opens in private markets. A portfolio manager approves the investment, and the allocation is made. If executing that decision takes two weeks, a competitor moves first, and the opportunity closes.

Execution gaps can persist for years undetected, precisely because internal metrics continue to improve while competitive position does not.

— Elsa Madrolle, Global Head of Commercial Engagement, SimCorp

The instinctive response of adding headcount often makes things worse. More staff increases coordination costs, slows decisions, and deepens the problem it was supposed to fix. The cycle only breaks when the distance between a portfolio manager's conviction and a trade stops being measured in handoffs.

Typically, launching a new strategy or asset class requires a system change before the first trade is made. Most firms haven’t mapped how many other decisions sit behind the same bottleneck. The four moves below define the characteristics of an agile organization to resolve that bottleneck.

The four moves above describe an agile operating model built for change. PGGM, a SimCorp client, is an example of what this strategic agility looks like in practice. PGGM Investments manages EUR 255 billion AUM across public and private markets on behalf of Dutch healthcare pension participants. In late 2024, PGGM committed to two of the most strategically significant changes in its recent history at the same time: full compliance with the Netherlands' Future Pensions Act and a fundamental shift to sustainable investing across the entire portfolio. Either initiative alone would have been a substantial undertaking. PGGM ran both simultaneously.

Why sequencing costs more than it saves

The natural response to two concurrent programs was to sequence them: complete one, stabilize, then begin the other. The logic seemed sound until one accounted for the cost. Every fund structure built for pension reform had to be revisited when the sustainable investing mandates arrived. Every new launch carried two sets of remedial work. The two programs shared the same underlying data and structural needs. Without an architecture designed to absorb both at once, that shared foundation stayed hidden and the work was duplicated.

The architecture that made it possible

PGGM's response was a design decision. Each new mandate was built to satisfy both requirements at once: eligibility for the sustainable investing strategy and readiness for pension reform, with compliance embedded from the outset.

We also created a fund structure allowing the new mandate to be ready for our impact investing strategy, but at the same time, being ready for the Pension Reform system, where we needed to unitize all our investments. And SimCorp was able to do it.

— Sander Tegelaar, Director IT, PGGM Investments

PGGM's design choice rested on a prior investment. The firm's migration to SimCorp's cloud platform, and a consolidated data warehouse, created a single consistent layer across all systems. The Future Pensions Act's individual-level transparency requirements were only manageable because that foundation was already in one place.

One of the requirements of the new pension system is also being more transparent. We have to explain how we are invested and what we are invested in. There’s a lot of data needed to answer that question. All the data from all the systems will come together in one place.

— Sander Tegelaar, Director IT, PGGM Investments

Two years ahead of schedule

PGGM went live with the new pension system on January 1, 2026, two years ahead of the industry deadline.

A tenfold improvement in processing speed across the platform gave investment teams faster access to portfolio data, which was key when every fund structure and portfolio transition demanded a fast, reliable answer.

Tegelaar's description of the go-live is the most precise account of what that looks like in practice:

We're live as of the 1st of January with the new pension system. It was maybe even a sort of boring go-live moment. As boring as I like it.

— Sander Tegelaar, Director IT, PGGM Investments

When architecture is built to absorb change, execution becomes unremarkable. For PGGM, that showed up on January 1, on schedule, exactly as planned.

The firms that turn internal efficiency into competitive position do so through architectural decisions made years earlier. PGGM's January go-live was the consequence of structural choices about where compliance sits, how data flows, and what the business needs to move with markets. Every choice about how the business is built shapes what your firm can pursue.