CIOs, portfolio managers, analysts and traders were among the example roles cited in the question put to participating firms in Funds Europe’s Top 50 ranking to identify employees involved in money management as distinct from numbers of overall employees.
This question helped identify a value of AUM per such person, in turn facilitating an efficiency benchmarking.
Firms in the Top 50 (who provided data – 35) have almost half of their global employees based in Europe (49%), much higher than the Challengers (19%) and Emerging (7%) that provided data. (Table 1a)
€2.1bn: European AUM per employee involved in full time money management at US firms
Unsurprisingly, European-based Top 50 firms had a much higher proportion of staff based in Europe (77%) than US-based firms (27%). (Table 1b)
The Top 50 and Challengers both had about 20% of their global employees involved in the full-time management of money, but for the Emerging firms (although there were only five of them) this increased to almost 30%. (Table 2a)
Firms based in the EU had about 30% of their global employees involved in the full-time management of money, much higher than the equivalent figure for European non-EU-based firms (19%) and US-based firms (18%). (Table 2b)
Following a similar pattern, EU-based firms had a much higher proportion of their European employees involved in the full-time management of money (30%) compared to European non-EU-based firms (19%) and US-based firms (14%). (Table 2b)
AUM per employee
European firms had a lower global AUM per employee (€1.35bn) involved in money management than US-based firms (€1.78bn). Interestingly, the split between EU and non-EU-based firms was exactly the same.
Looking only at European AUM and European employees, European firms again had a lower European AUM per employee involved in money management (€1.35bn, exactly the same figure as their global proportion).
European non-EU-based firms had the lowest European AUM per employee involved in full-time money management (€1.24bn) compared to €1.44bn for EU-based firms and €2.10bn for US-based firms. (Table 3b)
Looking just at European manager countries of origin, the efficiency measurement for France stands out (€1.76bn) when compared to the UK (€1.31bn) and Switzerland (€1.05bn).
However, this is somewhat skewed by the lack of data from certain key French managers.
For further insight and in-depth analysis, explore the 2026 Funds Europe Top 200 & Top 50 report.
