German managers reassert dominance over US players in KVG market

Five US asset managers have fallen out of the top 10 providers in Germany, according to an influential ranking published by Scope Analysis.

Around one-fifth of Legg Mason’s funds offered on the German market lost their A-rating from Scope. Goldman Sachs Asset Management, State Street, JP Morgan Asset Management and Invesco also did not hold on to their positions at the top of the ranking.

The German rating agency Scope annually ranks providers of KVGs, institutional funds on the German market.

In this year’s analysis of the large asset managers, the rating agency reported that Legg Mason had suffered the biggest drop, with only 34.5% of its funds still labelled A by Scope, compared to 54.5% last year.

German providers including Metzler, Union Investment, Vontobel and Allianz Global Investors replaced them in the top 10 list, alongside Investec.

Both Vontobel and Investec were rated among the top large asset managers (with more than 25 evaluated funds) for the first time this year.

“An increased German presence is significant because the purely quantitative KVG ranking tends to favour foreign managers,” Scope said in its analysis.

The analysts said that major international asset managers usually only offered a fraction of their funds – usually their most successful – to the German market.

“German managers, on the other hand, are represented by their entire product offering in the KVG ranking,” Scope added.

At the beginning of last year only one German provider, Deka, had been among the top 10, 

The first place in the ranking was maintained by Austria’s Kepler-Fonds: 62% of its funds currently hold an A-rating from, Scope compared to 56% for Investec and Metzler.

In total, Scope evaluated 5,900 UCITS funds on offer in Germany from 313 asset managers with a KVG license. Only 8.5% of this total held A-ratings.

This also included funds from smaller asset managers, with between eight and 24 rated funds.

In this ranking Comgest lost its top position despite 12 of its 17 evaluated funds (70.6%) holding an A-rating. This was down from 90% last year.

Comgest was overtaken by two small boutiques with only eight evaluated funds each: DNCA Finance – which achieved an A-rating for all eight of its products – and Sparinvest (six out of eight).

Large asset manager ratings

Small asset manager ratings