An eye on the European prize

LEADER

It is a familiar sight for wealth managers: European fund groups touting lofty ambitions to establish a UK presence, followed by a gradual scaling back of those goals and perhaps even a quiet admission of defeat.

For those continental players, the UK retail market may not quite be where fund management expansion plans go to die, but it remains, as they say, a tough nut to crack. That has not stopped many players trying – if anything, the number seems to have increased in recent years, despite the pressure now being put on fees by the advent of unbundled charging. More notable, perhaps, is that after a quiet few years, the expansionary trend seems to be just as evident in the other direction. Familiar UK names such as M&G, Threadneedle, and Jupiter are already seeing sizeable inflows from th...