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.
The Paris-based group attracted 46 billion euro of net inflows into ETFs in 2025, with momentum accelerating sharply in the final quarter, when passive products alone pulled in 18 billion euro. Passive strategies accounted for the overwhelming share of Amundi’s 87.6 billion euro of total net inflows for the year, reinforcing its position as Europe’s dominant ETF provider.
The figures also hint at a broader strategic shift, as pressure on traditional bank distribution coincides with deeper investment in technology through the Alto platform and a push into higher-margin private assets via its partnership with Intermediate Capital Group (ICG).
Performance fees up 23%
The earnings picture, however, tells a more nuanced story. Performance fees rose 23 percent year over year to 173 million euro, driven largely by fixed income and multi-asset strategies. Active management recorded positive net inflows of 13 billion euro in 2025, modest compared with ETFs but far more significant in margin terms.
Management argues that this balance is becoming more resilient as Amundi deliberately broadens its earnings base beyond market-dependent flows. Valérie Baudson, chief executive, explained that “we are onboarding more and more clients, which means that we are building more and more recurring revenues, which do not depend on the markets or on the geopolitics, and which are reinforcing our position.”
Distribution pressure
That reliance on active management also helps explain why headline retail figures mask growing stress in traditional bank distribution. While Amundi reported positive retail net inflows of 21.7 billion euro in 2025, outflows from the UniCredit network alone amounted to 16 billion euro over the year.
Baudson sought to put those figures into perspective. “What I can tell you is that UniCredit represents today 86 billion of assets under management group-wide, among which 66 billion in Italy. And that means 86 billion out of 2.38 trillion euro. I just wanted to highlight the global picture on that front,” she told financial analysts.
The retreat is strategic rather than cyclical. UniCredit has been deliberately redirecting flows away from Amundi as it seeks to rebuild in-house asset management and regain control over fee generation. The shift has been accompanied by rising political friction between UniCredit and Crédit Agricole, Amundi’s parent, notably since Crédit Agricole blocked the Italian bank’s attempt to acquire Banco BPM.
Although the distribution agreement runs until 2027, the partnership is already unwinding in practice.
Capital redeployed in private markets
Against that backdrop, Amundi is redeploying capital to rebalance its growth drivers. The group has set aside between 700 million and 800 million euro to build a 9.9 percent stake in London-based private equity firm ICG, a partnership announced last November.
The move underscores Amundi’s ambition to expand its exposure to higher-margin private assets at a time when fee pressure in traditional active strategies is intensifying. Private markets remain small relative to Amundi’s overall balance sheet, but the ICG partnership marks a shift away from pure manufacturing and distribution scale toward selective ownership in alternative asset platforms.
It also highlights the contrast between low-margin, high-volume ETFs and capital-intensive private assets, where pricing power remains stronger.
Technology as a margin defense
Technology forms the third leg of that strategy. Through its Alto platform, Amundi is building a software business designed to offset margin pressure in asset management and reduce reliance on external infrastructure providers. Originally developed in-house, Alto has been recast as a cloud-based platform and positioned as a European alternative to Blackrock’s Aladdin.
Adoption accelerated in 2025. Alto was selected by Van Lanschot Kempen, the Dutch wealth manager, as well as AJ Bell Investments and People’s Pension in London. Denmark’s Bankdata, jointly owned by the country’s seven largest banks, has also adopted the platform, accounting for roughly one third of Alto’s current investment pipeline.
These client wins highlight growing demand among European banks, wealth managers and pension funds for locally governed, modular infrastructure as an alternative to US-owned systems such as Blackrock’s Aladdin.
Margins still under pressure
The shift toward passive products nevertheless continues to exert pressure on margins. Management fees rose just 4 percent over the year, reflecting erosion linked to product mix and pricing, even as assets under management reached a record 2,380 billion euro at the end of December.
Tight cost-to-income control kept the cost-to-income ratio just above 52 percent.