Asset management Frankfurt

Asset management is the job of investing other people's money: a fund manager decides which shares, bonds or other assets a fund holds, and a portfolio manager at a bank or insurer does the same for a client mandate. The person or team is paid a management fee, usually a small percentage of the assets, and is judged on performance against a benchmark or against the client's stated goal.

The largest part of Germany's regulated fund industry operates from Frankfurt. The trade body BVI, the Bundesverband Investment und Asset Management, is headquartered in the city and represents the industry toward regulators and lawmakers; its member firms manage several trillion euros on behalf of retail investors, insurers, pension schemes, banks, churches and foundations, by its own account.

DWS Group sits on Mainzer Landstraße and is majority-owned by Deutsche Bank, with more than one trillion euros in assets under management according to its own reporting. Union Investment, also headquartered in Frankfurt, manages €534.7 billion by its own figures and is the asset management arm of the German cooperative banking group, working with the more than 6,800 branches of the local Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken.

International managers keep a Frankfurt presence for the same reason: access to German institutional clients and to supervision by BaFin, which every EU asset manager selling into Germany eventually has to account for. Anyone who works with asset managers in Frankfurt deals with these international offices as often as with German-owned houses.

Managing client assets is a licensed activity. A firm that runs a fund needs authorization under the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch (KAGB), Germany's investment code, as a capital management company, and a firm that manages individual portfolios for clients needs a license under section 32 of the Banking Act. BaFin supervises both from its offices in Bonn and Frankfurt am Main, checking that the firm has the capital, the organization and the staff to run the business safely.

On top of the license, MiFID II sets the conduct rules for anyone advising on or managing investments for a client: cost disclosure, suitability checks and rules on conflicts of interest. These rules apply the same way to a fund manager at DWS as to an advisor at a small Frankfurt boutique.

Finance Loop is the meeting place in Frankfurt for people in asset management, WealthTech and private banking: portfolio managers, analysts, advisors and the founders of the platforms they use. Finance Loop connects the finance, IT and AI communities and is built in collaboration with TechQuartier and Frankfurt Main Finance.

Finance Loop was a partner of the FinTech Founder & Investor Evening, presented by Finteda, the law firm Schalast and the wealth management software company Fincite. Finteda, the practitioner network for finance, technology and data, supports the Claude Hacker House series together with Finance Loop. Related pages: WealthTech in Frankfurt and family offices in Frankfurt.

Asset management means investing money on behalf of someone else, whether that is a retail fund, a pension scheme or a single wealthy client, in exchange for a management fee.

A Kapitalverwaltungsgesellschaft (KVG), or capital management company, is the firm that manages an investment fund in Germany. The capital management company needs BaFin authorization under the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch (KAGB), and BaFin checks its capital, organization and staff before granting it. DWS and Union Investment in Frankfurt work through such companies.