Asset Managers

Asset manager L&G is planning to set up hybrid “crossover” funds alongside its extensive passive business. These funds will contain both public and private investments. With this in mind, the British asset manager is working with specialists such as Blackstone.

The development that some large banks in Europe are closing their doors to open architecture and internalising asset management is good for their margins in the short term but could create a long-term problem. That is what UK CEO Maxime Carmignac of Carmignac said. “Asset management is a different profession, with a different culture and dynamics. We are already seeing that this is starting to work against some banks.”

AXA Investment Managers is shutting down its fund focused on biodiversity due to a lack of investor interest. “We continue to believe in the theme, but from now on within a broader context,” the explanation said.

The failed partnership between Italy’s Generali and France’s BPCE is more than a collapsed deal in European asset management. It exposes how challenging it remains for Europe to build financial scale once a project becomes truly cross-border, and how protectionist reflexes, legal uncertainty and unfinished integration can combine to smother a transaction.

European regulator Esma is advocating a revision of research rules, expected to take effect next year. Allowing research and trade execution to be paid for jointly again could create new opportunities for smallcap coverage.

Assets managed through discretionary mandates have expanded more slowly in Europa over the past ten years than assets held in investment funds. That is the conclusion of Efama, the European fund industry association, in its latest sector review.

Many fund houses mark Liberation Day—the day president Trump announced sharply higher US trade tariffs—as the standout moment of 2025, according to the Investment Officer Outlook Survey 2026. But what surprised asset managers even more was how quickly markets carried on in the months that followed, as if nothing had happened.

In 2020, VanEck chose Liechtenstein to lay the foundation for its first crypto investments. Since then, the crypto team has expanded significantly. According to VanEck, this is a preview of what the future of fund management may look like.

Fund house Amundi presented its strategic three-year plan on Tuesday. It includes a new business line focused on active ETFs and white-label ETFs.

Anna Rosenberg of Amundi Investment Institute says the same forces that once drove nuclear and space spending now fuel an expensive, open-ended struggle for technological supremacy.