A consequence of the rise of self-service indexing may prove additionally important: asset managers and asset owners will increasingly operate their own internal systematic benchmark universes rather than relying solely on a limited set of published benchmarks.

After our first articles on what is at stake in self-service indexing and on the technology required to build it, we thought it was important to clarify the vocabulary.

If index technology becomes a foundational infrastructure for asset managers, banks, index providers and even wealth platforms, the question is not only who builds it. It is also: what kind of technology can make self-service indexing genuinely scalable, trustworthy and institutional-grade?

Self-service indexing is not just about building indices faster. It is about defining the software layer through which tomorrow's investment strategies will be designed, governed, and scaled. The real question is: who gets to set the defaults?

Introducing MCFT Folio Insights, a new series of posts on index technology, strategy construction, and the practical lessons learned while building a self-service indexing platform.

Introducing MCFT Folio® 1.0, our cloud-native, no-code and AI-powered platform that helps investors to move from Idea to Investable, in seconds.