State Street's Finance Reimagined study, conducted by Roubini ThoughtLab, surveyed 500 investment provider executives about their emerging technologies.
Specifically, investment providers were asked to name the 'smart' technologies they believed would be most prevalent in their organisations in five years' time.
Blockchain came out on top with 64 per cent of respondents agreeing that it could "transform the trade lifecycle and drive transparency, traceability and trust".
In second place was predictive analytics, with 50 per cent of those surveyed saying it would help "spot trends in customer needs" and "drive future decision-making".
Artificial intelligence, real-time tracking systems and 'identification software based on biometrics' rounded out the top five emerging technologies for the investment providers surveyed.
Of the professionals surveyed in APAC, Japan-based investment providers are ahead of their geographic peers when it comes to digital transformation, with Australian-based providers coming in second (followed by China and Hong Kong).
The State Street study also identified three aspects of data that will define financial stewardship in the coming decade: integration, intelligence and integrity.
"Integration, the ability to combine both structured and unstructured data; intelligence, the ability to draw new insights with the help of emerging technologies that will enable improved decision-making, performance measurement and client centricity; and integrity, the ability to better safeguard data with the highest levels of security," said the report.
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