Weekly Fund Distribution Notes – 22 July 2025
16th October 2025
Some great tier one fund selector interviews and various key player insights from Citywire Selector. Also, some interesting active / passive and fund level flow insights from June and the first half of the year.
Let’s kick off with some buy-side news. Citywire Selector published a feature about Jessica Sellam, who heads up Rothschild & Co’s alts selection team. She has been allocating to private markets for 2 decades through closed-end funds, but so far not via evergreens. “I’m not so sure that evergreen funds will be liquid in a stressed situation. But these funds may be useful for those starting with their allocation to private markets. From our clients’ perspective, some of them don’t want to wait five years to be invested, so that’s where evergreens can come in.” Citywire also ran a worthwhile read on its survey of 10 large private banks on the use of semi-liquid funds. Although 80% use evergreen funds (such as ELTIFs, open-ended funds under UCI Part II or interval funds), the article also highlights important concerns.
Citywire Selector also featured an interview with Pablo Martín, head of Quality Funds at the Spanish giant BBVA, on what it takes and what the key requirements are to get a fund on BBVA’s radar, together with the process. Check it out – see link section below. Martin’s team, composed of 38 individuals, looks after more than EUR 70 billion in assets across actively managed funds, ETFs and private market vehicles. Following on from an earlier article, the publication also featured polling insights from Benelux fund selectors on European investment opportunities, defence and the potential of a single European capital. See link section below.
In terms of mandates, IPE ran a story on European asset owners about swapping US managers for Europeans in response to an ESG retreat – a topic which we have covered extensively during the last couple of weeks and months. The sustainability-focused boutique Osmosis IM has launched a pair of fixed income funds, The Osmosis Global Credit and Osmosis Global High Yield Funds, seeded with EUR 300 million by Australia’s Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation. The funds are run by Osmosis NL, of which the Commonwealth Superannuation Corporation owns a significant minority stake. The Dutch Osmosis outfit is also backed by the Oxford Endowment Fund, which owns a minority stake in the parent company. Nice backers to have.
Change of scene. Like in May, active funds outpaced their passive rivals in June again – albeit exclusively driven by respective fixed income flows. All in all, active funds collected net inflows of EUR 30.1 billion last month, versus their passive peers with net sales worth EUR 25.6 billion. Our chart of the week below features the best and worst-selling fund level categories in June.
Despite rather remarkable events this year so far, H1 2025 wasn’t a bad flow period. The European fund industry garnered net inflows worth EUR 281 billion – an increase of 95% over the same period of 2024! Active strategies experienced overall net sales of EUR 110 billion (versus some shy EUR 17 billion in H1 2024). EUR 171 billion went to passive funds, of which EUR 131 billion went into ETFs.
All in all, 72 managers had net inflows larger than EUR 1 billion in the first half of this year (versus 51 in 2024) and 301 fund groups saw net sales larger than EUR 100 million (versus 241 in 2024). On the other side of the spectrum, numbers also improved. “Only” 29 asset managers faced net redemptions larger than EUR 1 billion (versus 35 in 2024) and 157 larger than EUR 100 million (versus 206 in 2024).
Also, 103 funds saw net inflows of more than EUR 1 billion (versus 101 in 2024), whilst 42 funds faced respective outflows (versus 47 in 2024). In this context, stay tuned for our next Biannual European Fund Distribution Landscape Report to be released at the latest on 4th August. It will be a fascinating one. So many interesting facts, surprises, but also myths and misconceptions.
All the best from a mild Valencia (32C only, almost winter).
