Digital financial platforms have created favorable conditions for asset managers to maximize their own interests by leveraging the flow effect. However, this development has also led to a significant deviation from their primary fiduciary duty of investing on behalf of clients. A prominent manifestation of this phenomenon is fund flow implantation: A novel strategy in which managers highlight the industry attributes of fund products to simultaneously cater to platform algorithms and investor preferences. As such, it represents a new form of agency conflict in the digital era. This study finds that fund flow implantation effectively attracts investor capital and contributes to fund size growth. Mechanism analysis reveals that this strategy aligns with the information display rules of digital financial platforms, leveraging popular industries and increased marketing expenditure to appeal to investors’salience-like preferences. However, its economic consequences include heightened investor risk exposure, diminished future returns, and a worsening misalignment of interests between funds and investors. These findings confirm that fund flow implantation intensifies agency conflicts, providing a critical policy basis for addressing the issue of “funds make money, but investors do not,” as well as for enhancing the regulation of digital financial platforms and the protection of investor rights.