Heading Towards Buyers | Yingmi Fund Xiao Wen: The essence of buyer investment advisory is building trust

Ask AI · How can buy-side investment advisors enhance clients’ sense of gain through long-term companionship?

Special Contributor Wang Lining, China Business Journal Reporter Xia Xin, Beijing & Guangzhou Report

“The essence of buy-side investment advisors is operating trust.” In an interview with reporters from China Business Journal, Xiao Wen, Chairman of Yingmi Fund, treats this line as the baseline for understanding the industry. In her view, all debates in the industry—from disputes over scale definitions to choices of transformation paths—ultimately converge on the same proposition: whether advisory institutions can truly stand on the side of customers, cash in trust with long-term performance, and help ordinary people earn tangible, real-life gains.

In her view, driving the industry toward a buy-side orientation hinges on mechanisms, not slogans. The defining feature of buy-side investment advisors is “high investment before, low after; low returns before, high after.” Its underlying logic is “clients’ interests first, long-term returns prioritized.” Meanwhile, the assessment systems of licensed financial institutions generally anchor on annual revenue and short-term scale—how to truly align these two sets of logic is the core issue the entire industry needs to face head-on.

“Thirty percent investment, seventy percent advisory”

On the overall industry landscape, Xiao Wen believes that the advisory business of large securities firms and fund companies overall leans toward “seventy percent investment, thirty percent advisory,” with an emphasis on asset-heavy allocation and product management. By contrast, third-party institutions represented by Yingmi are closer to “thirty percent investment, seventy percent advisory,” devoting their main efforts to customer companionship on the liability side and behavioral intervention.

“The biggest enemy of long-term money isn’t market volatility, but clients’ short-term expectations and behavioral deviations.” She said the most core value of investment advisory lies in accompanying customers through market fluctuations, not going silent with fear when markets fall. This is also the underlying logic behind Yingmi’s push for its “Qie Man” platform for account-management advisory—using a classification framework of “active money, stable money, long-term money, and insurance protection” (“four money” categories) to match clients’ fund attributes, turning abstract return expectations into tangible life goals such as “retirement” and “education.” It helps clients shift from focusing on short-term net value fluctuations to focusing on achieving the completion rate of long-term wealth-management goals.

By the end of 2025, Yingmi Fund’s total buy-side advisory scale was 51.5 billion yuan. “Our scale isn’t just about numerical growth; it’s about actually helping clients make money through high-volatility equity allocation.” Xiao Wen believes that this absolute number of total advisory scale isn’t the most important part. More important are the quality indicators behind it: on the Qie Man platform, the proportion of advisory clients who are profitable exceeds 90%, the allocation to equity assets accounts for over 60%, and the average holding period by clients exceeds 730 days.

Long-term money enters the market—advisory is the right time

Around 2026, as “deposit relocation,” insurance capital expansion, and the expansion of the third pillar of pensions progress, long-term funds from all sides are converging into the equity market. Buy-side investment advisory is widely viewed as a key channel to absorb this wave. Standing at this important industry inflection point, Xiao Wen has a clear and sober assessment of the development path, and she is also full of expectations for the space ahead.

In her view, the most worthy breakthrough to focus on now lies in further enriching the categories of products that investment advisors can allocate. At present, the China Securities Regulatory Commission’s pilot program for fund advisory focuses on publicly offered funds and private funds. As low-correlation categories such as REITs, commodity hedging tools, and alternative assets targeting pension goals are gradually included, the portfolio’s cross-cycle and diversified allocation capability will be substantively improved—so that long-term money can truly find better-suited destinations.

Ongoing upgrades to tool and platform capabilities provide crucial support for this process. Xiao Wen said that buy-side investment advisors need to cover the entire process—from investment research and decision-making, portfolio construction, and risk monitoring to customer companionship—in a digital middle platform. This will accelerate the upgrade of frontline advisory services from a “workshop-style” model that relies on individual experience to a modern service model that is standardized, professional, and industrialized, significantly improving the stability of services and the ability to provide scaled supply.

Based on this judgment, Yingmi launched the TAMP platform, packaging its matured strategy system, intelligent advisor workbench, and a customer-companionship content library as modular outputs for partner institutions. This enables mid-sized institutions to obtain investment-advisory middle-platform capabilities quickly at a reasonable cost without building a large investment research and advisory team from scratch. This model can be summarized as “capability as a service.”

Regarding the problem that scale statistics use inconsistent measurement standards, Xiao Wen recommends that the Asset Management Association of China establish a data disclosure column for investment advisory, requiring that scale disclosures be issued in sync with quality indicators such as clients’ profitability ratio and average holding period—so that scale and service quality truly connect.

“Building a unified standard isn’t to make everyone’s rankings look better. It’s to bring the industry back to its original purpose of putting client gains at the center.” Xiao Wen believes that all debates about buy-side investment advisory ultimately converge on the same proposition: turning fund net value investment returns into a real sense of gain for investors in their accounts. Bridging the “last mile” is the industry’s mission, and it is also the only yardstick for measuring the quality of transformation.

(Editor: Xia Xin; Reviewer: Li Huimin; Proofreader: Zhang Guogang)