Revenue pressure in wealth management is no longer cyclical. It is structural.
That is the central message of a new research paper released today by The Wealth Mosaic, produced in partnership with PureFacts. Optimising Revenue Management: Spillage, Leakage, and Pricing Discipline explores how firms are quietly losing revenue not through headline fee cuts, but through operational complexity, fragmented systems, and weak pricing governance.
For many firms, growth is masking a deeper issue. Assets under management continue to rise, yet margins fail to keep pace. The research explains why.
The invisible tax on growth
The paper introduces two concepts that immediately resonate with industry leaders: spillage and leakage.
Spillage occurs when firms under-price or over-discount services, leaving earned value unrealised before it ever enters the revenue pipeline.
Leakage occurs when revenue that should be collected is lost through billing delays, misapplied pricing, incomplete data, or operational inefficiencies.
Together, spillage and leakage form an “invisible tax on growth”, quietly eroding margins while often being accepted as business as usual.
Industry benchmarks cited in the research suggest firms may lose 2-5 percent of annual revenue through these dynamics alone. In a market defined by fee compression and rising operating costs, that level of loss is no longer sustainable.
What readers will learn in the full paper
The research goes beyond diagnosis, offering a practical framework for how leading firms are responding, including:
- Why revenue loss is structural, predictable, and accelerating, driven by complexity rather than individual errors
- How fragmented technology stacks and manual processes amplify both spillage and leakage, particularly post-acquisition
- Why pricing discipline is the highest-impact lever for margin recovery, often more effective than headline fee increases
- How managing revenue as a single, integrated lifecycle transforms revenue management from a control function into a growth engine
- The “compliance dividend”: how integrated revenue management strengthens auditability, transparency, and regulatory confidence by design
Executive perspectives throughout the paper show how small pricing and data issues compound at scale, and why firms that address them structurally are better positioned to defend margins and sustain growth.
Where PureFacts fits
The findings of this research closely align with the challenges PureFacts was built to address.
PureRevenue is an end-to-end revenue management platform purpose-built for the investments industry, enabling wealth and asset managers to manage pricing, fee billing, adviser compensation, and performance analytics through a unified revenue lifecycle. By providing a single, trusted revenue book of record, PureFacts helps firms strengthen pricing discipline, reduce spillage and leakage, and gain the visibility required to manage revenue with confidence in complex, highly regulated environment
Why this matters now
The economics of wealth management have permanently shifted. Fee compression, product proliferation, adviser mobility, and regulatory scrutiny are not temporary headwinds. They define the current operating environment.
In this context, revenue integrity becomes a competitive differentiator. Firms that invest in disciplined pricing frameworks, integrated revenue lifecycles, and trusted data infrastructure are better equipped to convert complexity into control, and growth into durable profitability. Those that do not risk absorbing revenue loss as a recurring cost of scale.
Read the full research paper
The full paper, Optimising Revenue Management: Spillage, Leakage, and Pricing Discipline, is available now:
