Reduces task duplication and friction through industry-wide common standards
Accelerates the creation, publication, and retrieval of reliable regulatory information
Makes standards directly usable by professionals and, tomorrow, by their AI agents
Unifying industry expertise around common standards
In asset management, regulation is everywhere. Standards, much less so. This paradox is striking in an industry where every investment fund relies on a long chain of interacting participants: management companies, administrators, depositary banks, legal counsels, auditors, and regulators. It is particularly pronounced in Luxembourg, the leading fund center in Europe and second globally behind the United States.
"It's an industry built on cross-controls: authorities supervise the sector, boards of directors supervise managers, managers supervise their service providers, and depositaries supervise management companies. It's a real bowl of spaghetti in a sector that, long accustomed to high performance, has never needed to invest in common standards," explains Revel Wood, Board Member of Global Asset Management Standards (GAMS).
In practice, regulations state what needs to be controlled, rarely how. "A management company entrusting fund administration to a service provider must ensure the job is done properly, but no text tells it what questions to ask," notes Mark Phillips, Independent Board Member at GAMS. "Consequently, every company drafts its own questionnaire. A single administrator might receive twenty different ones covering the exact same topics, while management companies never truly know if the regulator will consider their approach sufficient."
Across the industry, this dynamic generates endless friction: the same questions handled repeatedly, data re-entered, and mapping tables overhauled whenever a provider alters a field. This is why GAMS was established as a Luxembourg non-profit association.
It's an industry built on cross-controls: authorities supervise the sector, boards of directors supervise managers, managers supervise their service providers, and depositaries supervise management companies. It's a real bowl of spaghetti in a sector that, long accustomed to high performance, has never needed to invest in common standards.
Revel Wood
Board Member, GAMS
Its mission is to provide the entire profession with a single, free reference source (due diligence questionnaires, prospectus templates, regulatory forms) that is standardized and usable by both humans and AI agents, thereby harmonizing how the industry applies regulations.
The board of directors brings together eight volunteer industry figures, including former PwC partners and former executives from Amundi Luxembourg and FundRock. Resources are developed in collaboration with professional associations such as EFAMA, INREV, and openfunds, with support from key players like Brown Brothers Harriman, Schroders, BNP Paribas, and Invesco.
Due diligence questionnaires, prospectus templates, regulatory forms: each standard is drafted by a working group comprising professionals from various sectors of the industry. To equip these groups, GAMS developed its own platform hosted on Google Cloud and built by Alis Exchange, a Luxembourg-based software company whose co-founder, James Spanjaard, sits on the board. Experts use it to collaborate in real time on document drafting.
"In a traditional working group, everything circulates by email: multiple annotated versions coexist, comments get lost, and eventually nobody knows which version is the reference," recalls Mark Phillips. "I remember developing a standard that took two and a half years, whereas it could have been wrapped up in a month with our platform's collaboration tools."
The platform also serves as a showcase. Published standards are organized into thematic collections, freely accessible without registration. Users can view them, download them, and propose improvements for working groups to incorporate into subsequent versions.
Using AI to accelerate content creation and information access
AI intervenes right from the drafting stage. Based on meeting minutes and presentations from a working group, Gemini models—powered by the Gemini platform—generate a first draft: FAQs, benefit descriptions, and data structures. "All that's left for us is to review and adjust: it takes twenty minutes to half an hour to get publication-ready content," explains Mark Phillips.
On the front-facing side, professionals have access to "Ask AI," an assistant built on Agent Search (Gemini platform). Anyone can query a collection in natural language and receive answers grounded exclusively in its source materials. "With AI, our standards are no longer just documents to download, but expertise you can converse with. For the industry, that is a game changer," believes Mark Phillips. "The combination of collaboration and AI makes all the difference: answers rely on expert-validated content with immediate access to sources," adds Revel Wood.
Response reliability was an immediate priority. "In a world where trust and hallucination risks are major concerns, you need reliable sources," emphasizes James Spanjaard. Ask AI therefore relies strictly on the corpus selected by GAMS: users get answers anchored in these resources and can directly access the corresponding documents.
"Building a grounded search system on your own is extremely complex," continues James Spanjaard. "Agent Search gives it to us out of the box: it indexes text, tables, websites, and PDFs alike, understands the intent behind questions beyond mere keywords, and updates automatically as soon as a standard is published, without any maintenance on our part. For a resource-constrained association, that is a decisive asset: every euro spent and every hour spent maintaining the platform matters."
The rest of the architecture relies on Google Cloud's managed services: Cloud Run hosts all applications, Spanner centralizes content, and Cloud Build automates deployments leveraging the AlisX platform (https://alisx.com). "For a non-profit association, infrastructure costs matter immensely. With Google Cloud serverless services, development is not only faster and simpler, but it also optimizes our resource consumption. Typically, Cloud Run scales compute resources automatically down to zero when the platform is idle," explains James Spanjaard.
Building a system like this yourself is a real headache. Agent Search gives it to us out of the box: it indexes text, tables, and PDFs alike, understands the intent behind questions beyond mere keywords, and updates automatically as soon as a standard is published, without any maintenance on our part. For a resource-constrained association, that is a decisive asset: every euro spent and every hour spent maintaining the platform matters.
James Spanjaard
Board Member, GAMS and Co-founder, Alis Exchange
Reducing friction across the asset management value chain
Proving that the platform addresses a genuine need, GAMS has already brought together over a hundred experts across its working groups, and its standardized SICAV prospectus template has been adopted by UCITS funds representing over €1 trillion in assets. Published standards have also been downloaded hundreds of times in the months following their launch. "Time savings are substantial at every level, both for experts collaborating and drafting, and for professionals consulting and applying the standards," highlights Mark Phillips.
Time savings are substantial at every level, both for experts collaborating and drafting, and for professionals consulting and applying the standards.
Mark Phillips
Independent Board Member, GAMS
"Some of the largest asset managers are already among our users," adds Revel Wood. Opening up to AI agents is expected to attract more: thanks to a public MCP server (Model Context Protocol, the standard linking agents to data sources), GAMS standards are already fully accessible to agents—such as those in Gemini—embedded into professionals' everyday tools. "Our standards will be usable not only by humans but also by AI agents integrated into users' standard workflows. They will be able to automate entire processes, such as generating a fund's legal documentation from its fact sheet and the GAMS template," he continues.
Following Luxembourg, GAMS is targeting Ireland, the UK, and Switzerland, with events planned in Dublin, London, and Zurich. Discussions are also underway across the Atlantic. "Friction knows no borders. That's why we called our initiative Global, rather than European, Asset Management Standards: if American managers want to join us, our platform is ready," states Mark Phillips.
"GAMS is an industry initiative, by the industry and for the industry: it's about giving the entire profession the means to reduce its own friction," recalls Revel Wood. "Asset management is just beginning to rethink its processes in the face of the upcoming wave of transformation. From this perspective, we are delighted to count Google Cloud among our partners: beyond working with a highly collaborative, entrepreneurial, and forward-looking Luxembourg team, we benefit from their vision, especially since our industry's transformation is a challenge Google Cloud cares deeply about."
The bowl of spaghetti is not untangled yet. But for the first time, the entire profession has a common tool to tackle it.
Global Asset Management Standards (GAMS) is a Luxembourg-based non-profit association dedicated to harmonizing practices within the asset management industry. Its platform enables industry professionals to collaborate on creating common standards—such as due diligence questionnaires, prospectus templates, regulatory forms, or data definitions—and make them freely available to the entire ecosystem. Developed with the AlisX Platform on Google Cloud, the platform also makes these resources ready for AI and, eventually, agentic workflows.
Industry: Financial Services / Asset Management
Location: Luxembourg
Products: Agent Search on Gemini platform, Gemini models on Gemini platform, Cloud Run, Spanner, Cloud Storage, Cloud Tasks, Cloud Scheduler, Secret Manager, Cloud Build, Artifact Registry
