Welcome to the Global 100 2025
This is now the 8th year that we have put out our annual analysis of the world's largest asset managers. In that time, we have had thousands of downloads, been asked to share our findings at many conferences, run more than a few strategy sessions, had our research cited by the biggest management consulting firms, and have been covered by the key media in our space. But more than anything else, we have valued the myriad conversations it has led to with asset managers of every size. It has helped us develop and refine our thinking about how to build, evolve and protect investment firms' brands.
With that said, nothing stands still, nor should it. Which is why we are very excited to unveil a refresh to our thinking for this year's Global 100. The Brand Diagnostic will, of course, remain - it is an invaluable tool that helps us benchmark whether our clients are building their brands. We have always wanted to find a more methodical, more evidence-based way to help firms consider their competitor positioning, and now we can.
So, with this year's Global 100, please welcome Peregrine Frame, our new analytical tool to help asset managers assess how distinctive their positioning is, how common, or otherwise, their key messages are. It is already clear that firms that score better for the distinctiveness of their positioning are more likely to be among the biggest winners when it comes to growing AUM. We hope you'll find this as useful as we do.
Following on from our joint Private Markets report with Boston Consulting Group (“BCG”) earlier this year, the Global 100 2025 shows that the asset management industry continues to be in a period of profound change. Many managers are clearly wrestling with existential issues. How do we achieve scale? Should we be considering inorganic growth? How do we incorporate AI into our business practices and our marketing without losing what it is that makes us unique? How to bring new life into a stagnant brand? It has never been a more important time for senior marketers to be able to take data-led decisions into board level conversations.
We aim to bring the most comprehensive data-driven analysis for your brand, and now you can view our report findings in your own dashboard.
We hope you enjoy the Global 100 2025!
Report Dashboard
Diagnostic
For the last eight years, our Brand Diagnostic has been the most used brand analysis tool in the asset management industry. See how your firm compares to its peers across our 10 key metrics.
Peregrine Frame
Our Brand Diagnostic shows you how strong your brand presence is, but Peregrine Frame has been developed to help you see how distinctive your positioning is. Use our new tool to see how your positioning compares with peers and how it could evolve over time.
Benchmark Yourself Against Your Peers
Please select two companies to view how they compare against each other across Peregrine's 10 integrated marketing communications metrics.
Total Scores
Peregrine Frame
Our Brand Diagnostic shows you how strong your brand presence is, but Peregrine Frame has been developed to help you see how distinctive your positioning is. Use our new tool to see how your positioning compares with peers and how it could evolve over time.
Key Findings
How Asset Managers' Brands Fare in 2025
Lightning Rod Risk in Private Markets
Digital Marketing: Momentum Slows
Category Authority Drives AUM Growth
Low Category Authority Linked to AUM Loss
The AI Lens Turns on Asset Managers
How Asset Managers' Brands Fare in 2025
Peregrine's Brand Diagnostic finds that 45% of firms are suffering stagnant or declining brand awareness, a figure not quite as high as previous years, but still a sign that almost half of managers are failing to build brand equity. Clearly this is problematic for an industry reliant on visibility and where the strategic imperatives for many, if not most, firms involve reaching new audiences, especially retail and wealth cohorts. Moreover, overall Share of Voice (SOV) has fallen 5% globally compared with two years ago, meaning that there is increased competition for media coverage.
BCG' s 2025 Global Asset Management Report* notes that the twin forces of retailization and the rise of active ETFs are creating a more complex stakeholder map for asset managers, making visibility among new audience segments critical.
The same BCG analysis also finds that intense margin pressures are also making cost a critical board-level focus. The way this impacts C-suite decision-making is affected by the kind of niche inhabited by their firm. For example, ‘alpha generators” (such as alternatives or active managers) will prioritize talent and corporate storytelling around what makes their talent distinctive, a trend already seen for some time with the larger multi-strat firms. Whereas for “Beta factories” (e.g. larger managers with a heavy emphasis on passive strategies) the focus will be on articulating the value proposition around scale, process and technology. For “distribution powerhouses” and “solution providers”, brand should logically become a board level concern, with the aim of converting marketing dominance into AUM dominance.
Firms must treat brand awareness as a board-level metric, tracking Brand awareness and Share of Voice with the same urgency as fundraising flows, not least because Peregrine's research over the years has shown that fund flows and brand are connected in the medium to longer term. Strategies should include thought leadership programs, more proactive PR engagement, and integrated marketing campaigns to defend and grow visibility.
Lightning Rod Risk in Private Markets
The Brand Diagnostic reveals that 88% of pure-play private markets firms had below-average media sentiment, and more than 75% were distinctly negative. Among the biggest players, Blackstone and Apollo each scored just 4/10 on media sentiment. The largest private markets players like Blackstone appear to have become “lightning rods” for the industry, with 10x more search interest than similarly sized non-PE peers.
While private markets' fortunes in the last two or three years have been mixed, McKinsey's LP study* finds that there is still positive momentum, with 30% of investors planning to increase PE commitments in the next 12 months. This suggests resilience despite sentiment headwinds. But reputational risk is becoming concentrated: when a handful of giants attract disproportionate attention, their negative coverage shapes perceptions of the entire sector, and in a “dynamic” policy environment reputational risk can quickly become political risk.
Large firms must invest in crisis PR, thoughtful and politically astute corporate storytelling, and proactive media campaigns to dilute lightning-rod risk. Smaller firms should build a strategic moat around their distinct propositions by owning specialist niches through targeted communications. This should also have the added benefit of diluting the risk of narrative contagion. Across the industry, positive narratives around long-term value creation and impact must replace purely defensive positioning.
Digital Marketing: Momentum Slows
Our 2025 Global 100 Report data shows 39% of firms still lack an always-on paid search strategy, only marginally better than 43% in 2023. Paid media adoption is similarly stagnant: 85% of firms lack an ongoing paid media presence in 2025, compared to 80% in 2023.
Digital channels are critical to reaching retail investors amid structural shifts. Yet, despite global fundraising falling 28% to $104bn in 2024 (lowest since 2012, per McKinsey*), most managers remain under-invested in the very tools that could expand their investor base.
Leaders should think about committing to always-on digital marketing infrastructure. Paid search should target high-intent investors, while paid media campaigns should be data-driven and continuously optimized. For products like active ETFs, digital storytelling (short-form video, webinars, potentially even influencer engagement) should be prioritized to meet retail investors where they are.
Category Authority Drives AUM Growth
Peregrine Frame - our new addition to our Global 100 analysis - shows that most firms cluster around 16 recurring key message areas, with client-centricity, ESG, and research-driven investing among the most common thematic areas. For example, over 90% of firms include client-centricity among their top three key messages, meaning firms' key talking points tend to converge around consensus rather than seeking out and owning distinctiveness. In an industry where consolidation continues apace and the competitive landscape remains highly contested, brands need to be braver with their positioning.
Positioning is not superficial, it's material, and deeply connected to the bottom line. Peregrine's analysis finds a strong correlation between high category authority (messaging distinctiveness and niche dominance) and AUM growth, and the payoff is exponential:
McKinsey* emphasizes that scale is being targeted as a strategic priority, but scale alone cannot compensate for weak differentiation. Mid-sized firms, in particular, risk invisibility if they rely on generic positioning. Distinctiveness, as Peregrine's Frame proves, is predictive not just of visibility, but of underlying business performance.
Managers must audit and refine their key messages to escape the gravitational pull of generic narratives. Sustainability and client focus are table stakes; true differentiation comes from originality and consistency. Leaders should align messaging across marketing, sales, and portfolio management so that firms are unambiguously associated with distinct themes (e.g., Asian expertise, quant-driven risk, infrastructure dominance).
Low Category Authority Linked to AUM Loss
Not only are firms with lower category authority less likely to make large AUM gains, they're also more likely to sustain AUM losses.
Firms with low authority are far more likely to lose AUM: about 27% of low scorers saw AUM shrink, compared with fewer than 10% of high scorers. Firms with low authority scores were far more likely to lose AUM - roughly 1 in 4 - compared with fewer than 1 in 10 for high scorers.
Scale can be a driver of resilience*, but Peregrine's Global 100 data proves that marketing strength and distinctiveness are equally predictive of financial outcomes. In fact, the best-marketed firms - those with clear, distinctive ownership of key themes - are more likely to outperform peers regardless of size.
Executives must treat messaging distinctiveness as a revenue lever. Marketing should not simply reinforce operations; it must differentiate the firm's value proposition in an increasingly homogenous industry. Leaders should audit key messages, double down on themes where they have authentic expertise, and invest in consistent communications that convert category authority into AUM growth.
The AI Lens Turns on Asset Managers
Peregrine has been analysing key technological trends that shape how the world around us is perceived since we investigated the impact of voice search on asset managers back in 2019. But never before have the tectonic plates of brand changed as much as with the advent of LLMs and Gen AI.
The business of raising and deploying capital is highly complex and we know that every imaginable stakeholder group - from LPs and regulators through to journalists - are already using AI tools to help conduct due diligence, analyse industry trends and provide background for news articles. And we know they will be using these same tools to look at asset managers brands, their differentiators and their backstories (both positive and negative).
Where search shaped perception through filtering what people could see about your firm, Gen AI does so by building your narrative.
Which is why this year's Global 100 has introduced Peregrine Frame, which we have built to achieve two things. Firstly, to provide managers with a lens on how Gen AI perceives their brand, because we know that will shape how stakeholders perceive the firm too. But secondly, to show managers where their brands are situated in terms of positioning versus competitors, to provide positional macro context.
As with everything we look at from a data perspective, the point is to provide actionable intelligence. With Peregrine Frame, we are introducing a framework through which asset managers can better see where their key messages may be stale, in need of a refresh, or simply not reflective of where the firm is moving at a strategy level. Or perhaps the brands' messaging footprint isn't fit for a world where machine intelligence is using public information to tell your story for you.
The first step in thinking about Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is going to be making sure your firm's positioning is right. Peregrine Frame provides a window into how asset managers are positioned and where there might need to be evolution.
If you want to find out more about Peregrine Frame and how we think about positioning, do get in touch.
Top Rankings
Methodology
This report focuses on a research group made up of the largest global asset management firms as ranked by AUM.
The firms selected were the top 100 independent brands in IPE's Top 500 Asset Managers survey. Firms that are owned or operated by a parent brand already included in the research group were excluded from the analysis. The group is scored, ranked and analyzed across the 10 key metrics (outlined below) and a dataset of over 12,000 data points collected between Q2 2024 and Q2 2025. It builds on the almost 100,000 data points already collated by Peregrine between 2018 and 2025. The firms' overall scores are made up of their scores across ten distinct IMC categories.
Where the Brand Diagnostic shows how brands are doing in terms of their brand presence, Peregrine Frame has been developed to look at how asset managers are perceived.
We've used AI deep search to extract the top three most prominent key messages for each manager in the Global 100 group from publicly available materials. This provided us with 300 different key messages used across the world's largest asset managers. With these key messages delineated, we grouped them into "buckets" or thematic categories, enabling us to cross-compare which key messages were most common and which key messages are more distinctive. Then we have scored each firm's key messages out of 10, which 10 being highly distinctive and 1 being more generic.
We then used this as a basis to create a Category Authority score for each firm based on individual key message distinctiveness as well as the combinatorial distinctiveness (how unusual the various combinations are) to assess how well each firm dominates its category. Category Authority is also scored out of 10.
Other Peregrine Reports
Find out more about other reports put together by Peregrine's analytics team.
