These aggregations are in my opinion very important because they allow the European asset managers to climb the steps of the world ranking which today is almost exclusive monopoly of the mega American managers who win the first 8 steps of the ranking as you can see from the graphic elaboration below. The Europeans are present with UBS that including both the part of the asset management acquired with the Credit Suisse operation, and their business Wealth (unlike the Bloomberg ranking) is in ninth place (with a quarter of the masses of the number 1 Blackrock/ Ishares), with the Allianz group (which considering the part of insurance management) is eleventh and with the French Amundi Twelfth.
Source: Sella & C.
Why is the aggregation in the field of asset management? Because it is a sector in which marginality has been in contraction for a long time for various reasons, including competition from the passive tools replicating low cost is the main one. The data contained in the BCG report on the world asset management clearly show it: the compression of the medium fees is 20% in the last 15 years and there is a corresponding growth in the percentage of revenues due to factors such as regulation, Digitization, etc. Consequently, a marginality that is reduced and that imposes more masses to manage.
Source: BCG Global Asset Management Report 2024
Recall that the three large trends that characterize the future asset management seem to be:
- Size and presence of both the active part of the investment and that of the passive investment (twelve of the first fifteen asset mangers worldwide also deal with ETFS).
- Great restart of quantitative strategies that through the AI and everything that follow are leading to new ways of producing Alfa through more systematic management.
- Increased presence of private markets in the customer asset allocation and therefore in the offer of assets mangers (for the record the largest “alternative” Blackstone asset manager has 1200 billion increases, in great growth).
We believe that the example given by Generali and Natixis is from BNP and Axa is important and we hope that it favors further aggregations.
We close the article, however, underlining the smaller asset managers as extremely important but very specialized in a management style or in an asset class; This allows them to often provide high -level performances being the great connoisseurs of their markets and to grow, but within the limits of a dimension that does not become excessive.
In this sense, we like to report names such as Algebris (UK/Italy) specialized on financial, Impox Asset Management (UK) and Robeco (Holland) specialized in sustainable and impact investments, Comgest (France) specialized in the Quality Growth and Flossbach von Storch style style (Germany) with their capital protection pentagram.
