There is a pivot in asset management towards the individual investor says Nabeel Ansari, author of the latest findings in the Broadridge Financial Solutions’ 2026 Global Demand Model (GDM) Trends Report.
The report is subtitled: Strategic Growth in a Volatile Era: Reassessing Asset Management Strategy in a Volatile and Risk-Aware Market, and Ansari says: “We expect organic growth to continue to be positive globally so you need net new money and we expect that, but I think the interesting part is that what we are seeing a pivot that’s towards the individual investor as people are taking more responsibility for their individual futures.”
The 2026 report finds that while global professionally managed assets are projected to grow from USD127 trillion in 2025 to USD164 trillion by 2028, the industry’s growth trajectory is becoming increasingly dependent on how firms navigate geopolitical uncertainty, evolving investor preferences and intensifying competition.
The firm writes that as performance alone becomes less of a differentiator, asset managers are increasingly focused on distribution capabilities, product innovation and access to new investor segments to drive growth.
The report says that distribution becomes the new competitive edge. “In an increasingly crowded marketplace, “distribution alpha” is emerging as a critical success factor, with firms evolving from investment-led organisations to distribution-led organisations in pursuit of growth.”
Ansari notes that in the US, individuals have to invest to self-fund their lives, and that has been a driving force behind the growth of the asset management industry there, but elsewhere there may be public health services, student loans and state pensions which have until now limited the need for individuals to take responsibility for their own investments.
“But other markets are opening up and need more information about the importance of investing and we are getting more educated,” Ansari says. “Margin pressures mean that managers are incentivised to turn to these individual investors and the individual investor has become really influential in terms of asset management.”
Enter ETFs, with the report noting that active ETFs continue to gain traction well beyond North America, with rapid expansion in Europe and APAC as managers launch new products and compete for investor flows.
Ansari says: “Being candid I don’t think the end investor is thinking about mutual funds or ETFs – they want access to their money and want to understand terms. The ETF answers a lot of those issues.”
He highlights the Broadridge research on the proliferation of active ETFs across Europe with a proliferation of new product and more new entrants coming into the market in Europe and doing ‘meaningful work’.
“What we have done is also look at the distribution of fees and these ETFs are not super low cost but an enhanced strategy falls within that 16-30 bps management fee range.”
The pressure of low fees means that new managers have to get to scale and get there quickly in this vibrant market. Ansari notes that the success of the ETF in Germany with its proliferation of retail savings platforms lies partly in the brands that dominate that are big recognisable brands at low cost.
“The UK has its own challenges with platforms which are outdated, built for OEICS but now you see a pooling of resources using other firms’ infrastructures, so you have to list and update your infrastructure to include ETFs,” Ansari says.
“The old world was OEICS in the UK and they are now out of vogue and not performing so in order to globalise you have to open up that architecture and get other products onto platforms.
“Growth is slow in the UK, but on the other side the UK investor is in a cost-of-living crisis which is just the environment we live in now and the platforms are slowly moving with the times.”
The threat facing ETFs, according to Ansari, is tokenisation.
“ETFs are threatened by tokenisation potentially,” he says. “They do somewhat similar things and when we think about the future moving towards digital currencies and tokenisation, it answers some of those questions around private markets with a private chain and a token in a private market fund but not everyone has a digital wallet and not everyone is au fait in investing with a digital token.
“So, will tokenisation replace the active ETF? I don’t see how but 20 years ago if you had asked me if the ETF would replace the mutual fund, I would have been sceptical.”
