$11 trillion beast: The world’s biggest money manager shows that size matters

BlackRock, the biggest beast in the fund management forest, on Tuesday (US time) announced that it grew its assets under management by 12 per cent to $US7.81 trillion ($10.9 trillion) in the third quarter from a year earlier. In normal times, that would be a staggering achievement; coming in the middle of a pandemic, it’s astonishing. It highlights the advantage that scale brings in winning new business and retaining existing clients in the arena of managing other people’s money.

It’s one of a trio of recent developments that reinforce the growing schism between the haves and the have-not-enoughs in the fund management industry. This week’s announcement that Fidelity Investments plans to hire 4000 new staff in the next six months is further evidence that size matters more than just about everything else, as is Morgan Stanley’s $US7 billion purchase last week of Eaton Vance to gain its $US500 billion of assets.

With $US3.3 trillion under management, Fidelity is a member of the exclusive $US1 trillion club – the supposed minimum amount of funds required to compete effectively for customers. As central banks have pumped trillions of dollars into the global economy to offset the economic effects of the pandemic, the firm says it’s enjoying a bonanza of new and existing customers opening more accounts and trading more actively.

For Morgan Stanley, the Eaton Vance transaction will swell the amount it oversees in its eponymous investment management division to $US1.2 trillion. As my colleague Brian Chappatta wrote last week, the US bank’s chief executive officer James Gorman had made no secret of the need to scale up in asset management.