Every so often the investment world feels as if it is quietly turning a corner, and these past couple of years have had that unmistakable feeling. As we enter 2026, what seems to follow is not a set of separate themes but a constellation of deeply interconnected challenges and opportunities that shape how investment organisations create value today.
Risk is becoming a dynamic, cross-portfolio property rather than something managed in silos. Decision making needs to move faster and draw on both hard data and the softer signals that help us interpret uncertainty. AI is shifting from a pilot tool to a foundational organisational capability. And across the world, large influential asset pools (the Gulf 5, Super 6, Public 7, Maple 8 and Euro 9) are redefining resilience, governance standards and total-portfolio implementation, setting expectations that ripple through the global industry.
In that environment, the challenge for investment organisations is no longer a shortage of themes, risks or opportunities. It is prioritisation and the discipline to align limited time, attention and resources behind what matters most. The five areas we focus on in this outlook are chosen with that lens in mind. While in no particular order, they sit at the points where external pressure meets internal capability, and where choices made in 2026 will have lasting implications for governance, portfolio construction and the delivery of member and client outcomes. Alongside these strategic themes, we share WTW’s top investment actions in 2026 and our asset research team’s macroeconomic and capital market outlook for the coming year.
#1 TPA is at a defining moment
What was once a frontier idea held by a small group of asset owners is now finding its way into the mainstream. CalPERS’ public decision to adopt a TPA framework has brought the conversation into sharper focus. Many see it as the governance reboot long overdue: a way to escape rigid asset-class silos, confront the realities of growing private-market exposure and make decisions that genuinely reflect whole-portfolio risk. Others caution that the hard part is not the concept but the execution: the cultural change, the complexity in governance, the clarity of reference portfolios and the challenge of measuring success in a more integrated framework.
Portfolios are now more interdependent than the governance models many boards grew up with. Inflation resilience, liquidity, climate exposure and concentration risk cannot be managed asset class by asset class.
A total-portfolio lens forces questions including: what is the role of each exposure in the whole, what is the next unit of risk we are willing to take, and how do we trade off private opportunity against liquidity and resilience? For us, TPA is less a technique and more a test of organisational maturity. It asks whether leadership can align beliefs, governance, strategies and data around the whole fund’s objective, and whether decision cycles can speed up without losing discipline. As more organisations move in this direction, 2026 is likely to reveal both the momentum behind TPA and the gap between ambition and execution. At the same time, advances in technology and analytics are making whole-portfolio visibility and coordination more feasible than in the past.
#2 The long institutional pivot accelerates in Wealth
Drawing on insights from our Global Wealth Study last year, we continue to examine the forces reshaping the wealth landscape and what may lie ahead, as wealth management undergoes a broad-based transformation. The industry, in fact, may have already crossed a threshold, with its defining features increasingly turning institutional, driven by inorganic consolidation, organic operating-model change, and capital re-routing. Let’s unpack.
On the inorganic front, M&A activity continues at pace, driving the industry toward fewer, larger, more institutional wealth platforms. Scale advantages, rising tech and operational investments, distribution reach, and service expansion are set to intensify this trend. Two dynamics stand out: brand polarisation and cross-sector activity. The market is splitting between scaled global or regional players and highly specialised boutiques, leaving undifferentiated mid-tier firms under increasing pressure. While vertical consolidation has dominated so far, momentum is likely to shift toward along-the-value-chain deals, such as asset managers or insurers acquiring wealth capabilities to strengthen integration, distribution, and client experience.
On the organic front, institutionalisation is unfolding in parallel through sustained technology and operating-model redesign – once discretionary capex, now survival spend – reinforced by rising governance and data requirements and the growing professionalisation of key wealth actors, notably family offices.
Institutionalisation is further reflected in the continued routing of wealth capital into private markets. So the ability to integrate public and private market offerings will be a key driver of success, continued consolidation and institutionalisation of due diligence and monitoring to face frictions of cost, liquidity and transparency.
Finally, ETFs and low-cost beta continue to dominate core allocations. Alongside deeper exposure to private assets, this may accelerate interest in tokenisation, with early-stage testing and broader rollout potentially emerging by 2026.
#3 DC is evolving under pressure
In 2025, we carried out a Global DC Peer Study, and one of the key findings related to income in retirement. This is not a new issue; what has changed is the environment in which DC organisations are trying to solve it. Inflation volatility, longer retirements and constrained public finances have raised the stakes. Increasingly, the debate is less about whether DC should support retirement income and more about how it can do so credibly. Alongside this, there is growing interest in private markets, not only as a return enhancer but also as a potential contributor to long-term income resilience through diversification and inflation-linked cashflows. The practical challenges lie in daily pricing, liquidity management, governance capacity and member communication, with poorly implemented complexity risking a loss of trust.
At the same time, the need for greater personalisation in DC is becoming more apparent. Members are not homogeneous, and retirement pathways cannot be one-size-fits-all. Technology makes more tailored solutions possible, but the challenge lies in delivering them at scale and at low cost. Overall, the next phase of DC will be shaped by organisations that balance ambition with realism, combining robust defaults, selective use of private assets and targeted personalisation, while keeping outcomes understandable and charges defensible for members.
#4 AI is reshaping the intelligence ecosystem
AI is reshaping investment organisations in ways that go far beyond automation. Organisations are no longer asking how to use AI, but where it should sit in the way the organisation thinks. That includes how research is done, how risks are evaluated and managed, and how decisions move across teams. And all of these are changing how we work: shifting effort from gathering information to interpreting it and allowing human judgment to be applied where it adds the most value.
As the industry moves deeper into a knowledge economy, the competitive advantage is increasingly shaped by insight, learning speed, organisational memory, and the ability to convert information into decisions with clarity. AI becomes part of the organisation’s thinking infrastructure.
These shifts create a new governance request. Looking ahead, organisations need clarity on which decisions can be AI-assisted and which must remain human-led. They need rules on how model outputs are checked, who is accountable for AI-augmented decisions and how errors are surfaced and learned from. Organisations also need to think about skills and culture around how to build teams that are comfortable working with AI, without outsourcing their judgement to it.
#5 Data facing a test of inference
As data, sources and uses continue to expand, the need for clear data-management frameworks and strong data foundations becomes ever more pressing. Without progress on this front, organisations risk reinforcing a familiar dynamic of “garbage in, garbage out”, which remains the central obstacle to generating decision-useful data.
Looking ahead, the challenge is therefore to build decision-useful data frameworks grounded in a more disciplined approach to how data is qualified and interpreted. One useful lens is centred on data provenance and data materiality.
Provenance provides transparency on where data comes from and how it has been processed. Is it a reliable figure? Materiality is whether the data offers a clear signal rather than noise and what is the quality of inference that can credibly be drawn from it. Is it relevant? Together, these dimensions help shape the narrative around data and determine whether it meaningfully supports forward-looking insight and judgement. Memo item: most data in our field is high-provenance, low-materiality or low-provenance, high-materiality. That’s what makes this challenge so difficult!
We see these themes as signals of where the investment industry is stretching, in its governance, its operating models and its use of technology. These themes set the direction for our 2026 research activities, project work and beyond, as we explore how investment organisations navigate complexity and sharpen their choices.
