Revolutions don't usually end up working out for everyone involved.

When things get shaken up, whether politically, economically or technologically, there's eventually going to be a loser.

We're currently seeing online shopping ravaging department stores, travel agents are quickly disappearing in favor of online booking sites, and of course the British probably didn't feel great about what happened in the colonies in the late 1700s.

According to Andrew Ang, head of factor investing at BlackRock, that's exactly what's going on right now in the investing industry.

In Ang's opinion, the development of custom, factor-tailored products is going to usher in a whole different age of investing.

"This is the next revolution in asset management," Ang told Business Insider at a recent BlackRock roundtable.

Ang was talking about smart beta ETFs specifically, but also the idea of investing in a particular idea in a safer way. These are types of ETFs, or exchange traded funds, that allow investors to expose themselves to a particular idea that may perform better than the index as a whole, but with lower volatility or concern than simply buying a stock.

For instance, if an investors felt particularly good about emerging market's growth outlook, BlackRock offers the iShares Edge MSCI Multifactor Emerging Markets ETF. By tilting the investment towards emerging markets, this allows investors to get higher returns in the event that these markets go up more than the rest of the world, thus outperforming an ETF that is more proportionally weighted.

ETFs are also attractive, because as we've noted, they have much lower fees for investors.