IPE - UK institutional assets at the 10 leading fund managers have increase by 11% over the past year, with BlackRock retaining the top spot, according to IPE's annual ranking.

BlackRock saw a 4% increase in assets to €331bn - claiming a 15% share of the €2.1trn in assets, representing more than 100 firms - with Legal & General Investment Management (LGIM) coming a distant second.

Ranked third with €137bn, BNY Mellon managed half of the assets of LGIM, which in turn managed €40bn less than BlackRock.

State Street Global Advisors (SSgA) reported €105bn in UK institutional assets, falling behind Aviva Investors, which saw assets increase by more than 10% to €133bn, and Insight Investment, with a €20bn increase over the same period.

Juliet Bullick, head of UK institutional in BlackRock's global client group, said the nearly €14bn growth at the asset manager was a result of both better market returns and an increase in existing mandate sizes.
 
"Rather than us having an objective and having achieved huge increases in the number of clients, what we've seen are clients expanding their mandates," she said.

She nonetheless noted that there was significant demand for diversified growth assets, "particularly from the small to medium-sized schemes who don't have the internal resources and governance budget to make strategic and tactical asset allocation decisions themselves".

"We are still seeing huge demand for liability-driven investment, and some of our existing clients are extending their hedging," Bullick said. "They are making their hedging more sophisticated, introducing total return swaps or gilt repos."

Overall, assets managed by the Top 10 firms rose 11.3% to €1.38trn from €1.22trn 12 months prior.

In spite of some asset managers, such as Insight, outperforming the average and seeing a 16% increase in assets, both it and Aviva retained their positions from last year's listing - with the former trailing the latter by one and coming fifth.

With SSgA in sixth place, Standard Life fell to seventh despite increasing assets by around €3.5bn.

Aberdeen Asset Management saw a steep fall to tenth place on the back of €10bn gains made by Scottish Widows Investment Partnership.

Axa Investment Management came in eighth place, while HSBC Global Asset Managers slipped out of the Top 10 to 13 after a €7.7bn decline in assets.

Both Threadneedle and M&G Investors posted respectable gains, with the former increasing assets under management by €1bn in just over a year, while the latter witnessed a more substantial boost of more than €6bn to €53.5bn.

Allianz Global Investors saw similar gains, reporting an additional €4.2bn over March 2010's €22.9bn, while Hermes Fund Managers saw a drop of around €2bn to €27.7bn at the end of March this year.

Baillie Gifford saw AUM rise by a similar amount from €30.8bn to €32.8bn.

The full ranking of managers of UK institutional assets can be found in the September issue of IPE.

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