Evolutionary Awards 2025 – Glacier by Sanlam: evolution in asset management

Category: Evolutions in investment

Describe your evolution:

The Glacier AI Flexible Fund of Funds and Glacier AI Balanced Fund represent a fundamental reimagining of portfolio management, born from confronting an uncomfortable truth: even the most experienced human portfolio managers are prisoners of their own psychology.

The Catalyst

Our evolution began with recognising that market volatility exposes human decision-making weaknesses at precisely the moments when sound judgment matters most. Fear drives premature exits, greed delays profit-taking, and confirmation bias blinds managers to contradictory signals. These aren’t character flaws—they’re hardwired human responses that erode investor outcomes across market cycles. Traditional solutions—more research, better processes, additional oversight—merely layer complexity onto the fundamental problem. We needed a different approach entirely.

The Partnership

The breakthrough came through our collaboration with A.I. Machines and their proprietary AI Investment Engine (PIE). Unlike “robo-advisors” that follow predetermined rules, PIE employs hundreds of machine learning algorithms that continuously analyse market data patterns without human interpretation or intervention. The PIE’s strength lies in what it deliberately excludes: news headlines, analyst forecasts, economic narratives, and any subjective inputs that introduce bias. Instead, it operates purely on market data behaviour patterns, identifying signals across equities, bonds, property, and cash—both locally and internationally—with a predictive horizon of 5-10 trading days. This short-term focus represents a conservative approach of “walking toward goals” rather than “jumping” to long-term static strategic asset allocation. By making frequent, data-driven adjustments, PIE seeks to capture upside while minimizing both the magnitude and duration of drawdowns—enhancing the compounding effect that drives long-term wealth creation.

The Implementation

From this foundation, we launched two complementary ETF-based strategies: The Glacier AI Balanced Fund serves investors requiring Regulation 28 compliance, delivering diversified exposure suitable for retirement portfolios while maintaining the discipline of AI-driven allocation. The Glacier AI Flexible Fund of Funds operates with broader latitude, enabling more opportunistic allocation shifts as market dynamics evolve, particularly valuable for investors seeking tactical diversification. Both funds operate without human portfolio managers, research analysts, or risk managers making investment decisions. This isn’t cost-cutting—it’s purposeful design. Every allocation decision flows from the AI process, eliminating the emotional and behavioural factors that compromise human judgment.

The Learning Curve

Integrating AI decision-making with human governance required fundamental mindset shifts. We had to learn when to trust the AI process completely and when human oversight adds value—not in investment decisions themselves, but in setting parameters, monitoring system integrity, and ensuring regulatory compliance. The most challenging aspect wasn’t technical integration but cultural adaptation. Investment professionals are trained to apply judgment, analyse narratives, and make subjective assessments. Stepping back to let an AI process to operate independently challenged decades of ingrained practices.

The Differentiation

What distinguishes our approach from other AI investment solutions is PIE’s complete independence from human assumptions about market behaviour. Rather than programming the system with theories about how markets should work, PIE develops markets knowledge bottom-up from data patterns. This creates genuinely uncorrelated decision-making. The AI often takes positions that diverge from prevailing consensus—both from our active managers and passive benchmarks—because it responds to different signals entirely. This provides authentic diversification rather than the pseudo-diversification of strategies that ultimately reflect similar human biases. The Cultural Impact Beyond portfolio outcomes, this evolution has inspired cultural change inside Glacier. By proving AI can serve as a genuine portfolio management partner rather than a marketing gimmick, we’ve opened pathways for technology-enabled advancement across our broader investment business. Ultimately, this evolution represents a shift from relying solely on human interpretation of markets to a hybrid approach — one where emotion-free, data-driven signals work alongside human governance. The result is investment management that combines the consistency and discipline of AI driven decision-making with the strategic oversight and governance that experienced professionals provide to deliver more consistent, diversified, and disciplined outcomes for investors. Looking Forward Our journey has proven that AI, when thoughtfully implemented, doesn’t replace human insight but amplifies it by removing the emotional and behavioural constraints that limit traditional portfolio management. The Glacier AI funds serve not just as investment vehicles but as proof of concept for how technology can enhance rather than diminish the human elements that matter most in investment stewardship. This evolution continues reshaping how we think about portfolio construction, risk management, and the role of human judgment in an increasingly data-rich investment landscape.

Describe the impact your evolution has had in response to its identified challenges and targeted outcomes.

The Challenge Addressed: Human portfolio managers, regardless of expertise, consistently fall victim to behavioural biases that surface during market volatility—precisely when disciplined decision-making becomes most critical. These biases create delayed reactions, emotional overrides of sound strategy, and correlation with other human-managed portfolios, ultimately compromising investor outcomes and genuine diversification.

Measurable Outcomes Since Launch: our AI-driven approach has delivered quantifiable improvements across key performance indicators:

Volatility Management: The Glacier AI funds have demonstrated superior drawdown control during market stress periods. By responding to early warning signals in price data rather than reacting to market narratives, the AI process often reduces risk exposure before major corrections, limiting both the magnitude and duration of losses compared to conventional strategies.

True Diversification: Portfolio correlation analysis reveals the Glacier AI funds often make allocation decisions that diverge from both active management consensus and passive benchmark weightings. This uncorrelated decision-making has reduced overall portfolio volatility for investors using the funds as diversifiers, improving risk-adjusted returns across their total holdings.

Disciplined Execution: The AI process’s 5–10-day reallocation cycle has captured numerous tactical opportunities that human managers missed due to hesitation or conflicting interpretations of market signals.

Client Response: Investor feedback consistently highlights three key benefits: the comfort of knowing emotional bias is removed from investment decisions, improved portfolio stability during volatile periods, and confidence in the systematic, transparent nature of the allocation process.

Cultural Transformation: Beyond performance metrics, the evolution has catalysed broader innovation at Glacier. Success with AI portfolio management has encouraged technology adoption across other business areas and shifted internal conversations from “whether” to “how” we can enhance client outcomes through intelligent automation.

Strategic Validation: The funds have proven that AI can serve as a legitimate diversifier to human judgment rather than a replacement for it. Clients increasingly view the Glacier AI funds not as standalone solutions but as complementary holdings that reduce behavioural risk across their broader portfolios.

Bottom Line Impact: The evolution has achieved its primary objectives: delivering disciplined, bias-free investment management while providing genuine diversification against traditional approaches. More importantly, it has established a scalable model for combining AI decision making with human oversight, creating a template for future innovation in portfolio management.

The success demonstrates that when properly implemented, AI doesn’t diminish the human element in investment management—it amplifies the value humans can provide by handling the tasks machines can do better, allowing professionals to focus on strategy, governance, and client service where human insight remains irreplaceable.

Supporting Documentation >