Raymond Frenken

Artificial intelligence has unsettled software stocks for months. Now it is testing European credit markets and exposing fault lines in parts of private credit that were sold to investors as stable and uncorrelated. “If the software issue remains isolated, markets can cope. If it bleeds into the real economy, then all bets are off.”

Investments in private markets are still characterized by limited information and imperfect transparency, particularly when compared with public assets. Asset managers increasingly see economic value in addressing that gap, turning greater transparency into a business model in its own right.

Schroders has agreed to a 9.9 billion pound (11.4 billion euro) takeover by US-based Nuveen, ending 222 years of family ownership and marking a further shift in global asset management toward American dominance.

Our weekly update of appointments and promotions in European asset and wealth management and in Luxembourg finance.

EU financial regulation in 2026 will mean tougher scrutiny from supervisors and fewer new rules. With major frameworks on fund regulation, anti-money laundering, sustainability and market structure largely in place, the focus is shifting from lawmaking to enforcement. Across liquidity management, delegation and distribution, AML oversight and transparency requirements, experts see firms entering a year shaped by supervisory interpretation and uneven application.

Sustainable funds recorded their first full year of net outflows in 2025, after investors withdrew 84 billion dollars from ESG strategies worldwide, according to Morningstar data. While the headline figure suggests a sharp break with previous years, Morningstar said it overstates the extent to which investors are abandoning sustainable investing.

Luxembourg has renewed the mandate of Claude Marx as director general of its financial regulator, extending his leadership of the Commission de Surveillance du Secteur Financier for another five years as the authority marks a decade of profound institutional change.

Amundi’s full-year results underscore how Europe’s largest asset manager has become a formidable ETF machine. Yet behind the record passive inflows, profits still rely heavily on traditional active management and a deliberate push into higher-margin activities.

Europe’s failure to complete its capital markets integration carries a measurable economic cost of around 150 billion euro per year in lost investment, according to a new report from the Citi Institute. Over a ten-year period, the drag on economic growth could amount to roughly 1.5 percent of GDP.