Asset management in Germany
DWS Group, majority-owned by Deutsche Bank, manages more than one trillion euros from Frankfurt, and every fund manager in Germany needs authorization under the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch (KAGB). International houses such as HSBC, Brookfield and Santander run German entities next to the domestic fund managers. Finance Loop events are in the calendar below.
What asset management means, in plain words
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 work for a single client mandate. The manager earns a fee, usually a small percentage of the assets, and is judged against a benchmark or against the client's stated goal. In German the field is also called Vermögensverwaltung, and both terms are in use.
Germany carries an outsized share of this industry in Europe because of its pension and insurance system: occupational pensions, life insurers and the cooperative and savings bank groups all route large pools of money through professional fund managers instead of running the investing themselves.
Where Germany's asset managers sit
Frankfurt holds the largest concentration of the field. DWS Group, majority-owned by Deutsche Bank, manages more than one trillion euros according to its own reporting, and Union Investment, the asset manager of the German cooperative banking group, works through the more than 6,800 branches of the local Volksbanken and Raiffeisenbanken. Both sit within reach of BVI, the Bundesverband Investment und Asset Management, the Frankfurt-based trade body for the German fund industry.
Munich and other cities hold a different slice of the field: insurer-linked asset management, where Munich Re's asset management arm invests the reinsurer's own reserves, and international managers with a German entity for regulatory or distribution reasons, among them HSBC Asset Management Germany, Brookfield Asset Management and Santander Asset Management.
The license behind managing someone else's money
Running a fund in Germany requires authorization under the Kapitalanlagegesetzbuch (KAGB), the investment code that governs capital management companies, whether the fund is open to retail investors or restricted to institutions. A firm that manages individual portfolios for clients instead needs a license under section 32 of the Banking Act (KWG). BaFin supervises both license types from its offices in Bonn and Frankfurt am Main.
MiFID II sets the conduct layer on top of the license: cost disclosure, a suitability check before recommending an investment, and rules on conflicts of interest. An asset manager in Hamburg or Munich follows the same conduct rules as one in Frankfurt, because MiFID II is an EU directive that applies the same way in every German state.
Upcoming events on investing and asset management in Germany
Asset management and Finance Loop
Finance Loop is the meeting place for people in asset management, WealthTech and private banking across Germany, Austria and Switzerland: portfolio managers, analysts, advisors and the founders of the platforms they use. It connects the finance, IT and AI communities and holds events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg.
Finance Loop is a partner of the FinTech Founder & Investor Evening, presented by Finteda, the law firm Schalast and the wealth management software company Fincite. Finteda also supports the Claude Hacker House series together with Finance Loop. Related pages: asset management in Frankfurt and WealthTech in Germany.
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What does asset management mean?
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. Vermögensverwaltung is the German term used alongside it, sometimes for a slightly narrower scope of individual portfolio management.
Asset management and Finance Loop
Germany's asset managers sit across several cities, and Finance Loop brings the people who work there together with WealthTech founders, private bankers and regulators at events in Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Hamburg. More on the network is on the About page.
Finance Loop is a professional network and has the goal of driving the adoption of emerging technologies in finance, such as AI, tokenization, stablecoins, and DeFi. Finance Loop helps its members build skills and personal networks in these fields: Investment & Digital Assets, Payments & Digital Money, and Risk & Compliance.