The largest wealth managers grew by double digits in 2020, report finds

The largest wealth managers in the world sustained only a slight dip in their double-digit growth during a year rocked by the coronavirus pandemic.

In fact, the steadiness of firms such as UBS, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch, J.P. Morgan Chase and Wells Fargo in their positions atop research and consulting firm Aite-Novarica Group’s annual rankings of the largest global wealth managers stood out to the report’s author, strategic advisor Meghna Mukerjee. At $29 trillion in client assets that expanded by an average of 14% per firm in 2020, the group manages an amount that’s more than a third of the gross domestic product worldwide for the year and only a tick off their mean rise of 15% in 2019.

The top 10 firms on the list have about 70% of the combined assets, a share that has remained roughly the same over the past few years, Mukerjee said in an interview.

“It goes back to the stability of these firms,” she said. “We've seen some real action from firms in the way that they've either reached out to new client segments or created different departments or just reorganized themselves to try to be better for clients. That was something that came out from a lot of these annual reports.”

On the other hand, Aite-Novarica’s latest list also reflects a developing shift that could be accelerating in future years, as the number of firms with North American headquarters slipped by one firm to 15 and the amount based in Asia increased by one, up to four. The private bank of the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China took over the final spot on the rankings from BNY Mellon Wealth Management. Bank of China and China Construction Bank, along with BNY Mellon and Europe-based firms Deutsche Bank and Santander, are just outside the top 25.

Edward Jones, Raymond James, Goldman Sachs and Stifel Financial have each boosted their client assets by an average rate of 10% or more since 2014, the year that Aite-Novarica first began keeping the rankings. In contrast, ICBC Private Banking’s assets have soared by a mean of 44% a year, while China Merchant Bank’s have jumped by an average of 51% annually.

Mukerjee and Aite-Novarica’s wealth management team use a combination of regulatory filings, annual reports, earnings calls and, in very few cases, some estimates in cases where they “absolutely cannot find any numbers,” she said. While it’s “not a perfect science,” they make every effort to get as close to side-by-side comparisons among firms as possible across countries, currencies and even variances in the timing of their fiscal years, Mukerjee said.

The team also aimed to rank the firms based on retail wealth management clientele rather than asset management or self-directed businesses. Scroll down to see which firms made the list and how many assets they managed by the end of last year.

Note: All figures come from the Aite-Novarica Group’s “Top 25 Global Wealth Management Firms Market Monitor” report for 2021. The numbers refer to the amounts listed by the firms as of the end of the year in 2020, unless otherwise noted below. The report focuses primarily on bank-based wealth managers and doesn’t include any privately held firms.