More Sobering Data on Fee Cuts, Pricing Wars

Recent research from Flowspring shows pricing pressure continues to persist in the industry, and asset managers have so lowered fees that they have given up more than $6 billion in revenue collectively since early 2014. The data analysis firm predicts that as the industry’s offerings become more commodity-like, firms will have no choice but to compete on price. Flowspring’s data also rank the firms who have been most aggressive in cutting fees and the firms who have been the biggest winners and losers in the pricing wars. A Financial Times report recently pointed out the increasing market share of the biggest asset managers and quoted research from Flowspring showing that the largest 1 percent of mutual funds manage 45 percent of industry assets – a figure 72 times larger than all the assets managed by the bottom half.