Here are some key quotes from my latest podcast with Jack Inglis, CEO of the Alternative Investment Management Industry (“AIMA”):

• “We offer advocacy, communication, education. But if I think I was going to sum it up in sort of one sentence, what do people get out of being a member? And one of the questions I get asked most often by members is: ‘What are other people doing when they’re faced with a particular challenge?’”

• “AIMA stands for the Alternative Investment Management Association. We’d always historically been there to support the hedge fund industry. But growing further into alternatives, as we’ve seen more crossover, we’ve established a service to be there for the alternative credit industry.”

• “But people with a pedigree who are able to attract investors, who’ve got a good proposition, they’re still starting up and they’re still doing well.”

• “The most important part I think of that is the need to have an absolutely excellent institutional type infrastructure, which is being demanded by [institutional] investors.”

• “But it’s very possible that there are investors out there who still think that hedge funds should produce supersize returns and are therefore disappointed when they don’t. But I think that’s the wrong way of looking at it.”

• “So aside from performance and meeting investor demands and expectations, the biggest challenge, and by far and away in the industry, is the margin compression that is going on.”

• “The operational future really has to be one where efficiencies are achieved. Otherwise, the cost burden by throwing just more people at the complexity just adds to the challenge that managers are facing. So the future has to be one of finding the right solutions.”

• “I mean, I think what’s interesting at the moment, Tery, is the way that regulators are really focusing on operational resilience.”

• “One of the key things that we are really trying to do certainly around the coronavirus . . . is trying to collate how firms are planning and share what best practices are at the moment.”