With all the imbalances and cross currents, 2026 is shaping up to be a year of inflection, not just for the economy and markets, but for the asset management industry as well. Even the most astute observer and prognosticator will struggle to predict exactly what that inflection will look like. That doesn’t stop us from trying, so please enjoy our top global asset management predictions for 2026 below.
1. Ctrl + (AI) + Del — Resetting the operating model for AI
Most asset managers today are piloting and/or implementing generative AI across their organizations by layering AI agents onto existing workflows and training agents to become task specialists. But reported productivity gains remain largely “trapped” in legacy processes and have yet to create measurable profit and loss (P&L) impact. Leading private equity and private credit managers, long accustomed to modular deal workflows, are restructuring workflows so they can be fully or partially automated. More managers will begin following this approach, breaking down research, distribution, risk management, and operations into streamlined components and re-engineering the end-to-end process with AI agents in mind, capturing cost and speed advantages that late adopters will not be able to match.
2. Partnerships part deux — The shift toward enterprise-level collaborations
Traditional asset managers, private markets firms, distributors, and insurers will all continue seeking partnerships as lower-cost and lower-complexity ways to fill capability gaps and address evolving market demands. But many parties to first-wave partnerships consummated over the last year or two that focused on pilot products — a mutual fund here, an ETF there — are growing restless with their initial alliances: too slow, too narrow, inflexible in changing circumstances. Many will replace or add to their existing tie-ups by raising the ante to enterprise-level deals: tackling multiple opportunities, combining talent as well as skills, and cross-investing to make their partnerships more adaptable, competitive, and enduring.
3. Partial credit — Private credit takes its final exam
After a decade of rapid growth fueled by benign credit conditions, private credit will face its first real test in 2026. Headline default rates in middle market loans, while trending upward, are still reasonably low at roughly 1%. But when selective defaults like payment-in-kind and “amends and extends” are included, rates are now pushing toward 5%, signaling underlying stress.
As the impact of higher rates and uneven global economic growth start to bite even more in 2026, it will separate the wheat from the chaff. Private credit managers that have maintained disciplined risk pricing, and adequately diversified across sector, size, and collateral types, will fare far better than those that have stretched to meet origination volume targets and/or investor commitments. Disciplined originators will emerge stronger and redeploy in new spaces, while volume-driven shops will retrench, consolidate, or liquidate. So far, most have passed the mid-terms; not all will pass the final exam.
4. Integrating private markets, not just gaining access
Democratization of private markets in wealth is not news — our analysis shows that private assets from wealthy clients are growing three times faster than those in institutional channels. As the industry makes material progress toward scaling model portfolios, and as semi-liquid funds and unified managed accounts converge, alternatives can be coded into portfolio allocations as permanent building blocks rather than peripheral exposures.
Partnerships between leading managers, turnkey asset management platforms, and technology platforms are industrializing what was once bespoke by standardizing subscription, liquidity, and data flows. Standards surrounding alternative investments for individuals will rise, shifting from simply providing access to offering full integration, engineering liquidity, benchmarks, and tax intelligence to make private markets blend more seamlessly into portfolios as core assets.
5. The paradox of investment choice — Why less delivers more value for investors
In a world increasingly embracing solutions, investors will value the ability to deliver outcomes more than choice. Expect increased acceptance and adoption of proprietary solutions — or solutions with a high share of proprietary ingredients — where managers can demonstrate a compelling case for why their capabilities produce superior investment outcomes and client experience.
This shift will also embolden managers to seek a greater share of the economics by expanding their control of the value chain, tightening product choice in existing proprietary platforms and creating vertically integrated advice channels. This will further advantage scale players who will argue there isn’t a trade-off between investment quality and investment choice.
6. Redesigning for retirement — Alternatives in DC
Getting private markets into 401(k)s and other global defined contribution markets opens a vast new opportunity for managers. Spurred by an Executive Order President Donald Trump issued in August 2025 that requires regulators to find ways of including alternative investments in 401(k) plans, managers are rushing to develop and launch potential products. Recent litigation so far appears to be amenable, as long as sponsors have taken appropriate care and due diligence. But there is still a gap between what alternative managers are emphasizing (“your returns will be higher”) and the industry’s consistent focus on lowering the fees for the last 50 years.
The gap will start to close as the industry shifts from promising higher headline returns to delivering participant‑centric solutions: liquidity‑aware structures, transparent pricing tied to participant outcomes, and product designs optimized for retail retirement horizons. There will be a key trade-off, however: gaining access will mean accepting lower margins.
7. Asset management scale, activist investors, and the “Valley of Death”
Fund managers with more than $2 trillion of assets under management have average margins of roughly 45%; those with less than $500 billion have average margins of 36%; but those in the middle are caught in a “Valley of Death” with average margins of 26% — squeezed between scale and simplicity.
These managers tend to compete in the same way as the largest managers, yet they often end up being too large and diverse to benefit from simpler operating models, but not large enough to operate at scale. While many CEOs and boards will scale by gobbling up competitors, others will look to reorganize themselves into slimmer, more focused boutiques, ruthlessly jettisoning product lines and teams that either are underperforming or do not fit with their long-term strategy.
Expect private equity and other activist sources of capital to increasingly start showing up in these discussions as they refine their restructuring playbooks for the asset management space. The barbarians are moving toward asset managers’ gates.
8. Survival of the fittest — asset management’s new distribution ecosystem
In 2025, digital wealth platforms and direct-to-client neobrokers accounted for up to 60% of new retail inflows for some leading asset managers, based on Oliver Wyman analysis. Insurers, banks, and fintechs are integrating investment products into their digital customer journeys, from savings plans to retirement dashboards. By 2026, the winners will not necessarily be the managers with the best-performing products; rather, it will be those that are able to embed their offerings into these multiproduct ecosystems, owning data feedback loops that inform product development, client engagement, and business strategy.
9. Internalization affairs
Expect a growing number of large asset owners, particularly sovereign funds and consolidating national pension schemes, to bring asset management talent under their own roof. Sizable investors have the heft to attract their own deal flow and make direct investments, creating their own capital ecosystem with less need for intermediaries and more ability to deploy funds in line with national policy objectives.
Nearly half of the world’s sovereign funds accessed private credit through direct-investment or co-investments in 2025, an increase from less than a third in 2024. In contrast, insurers — even the largest ones — will move in the other direction, looking to outside managers to boost risk-adjusted yields. Sovereign money in the Middle East will increasingly need to be replaced by insurance money in Middle America.
10. Blockchain and tokenization will hit an inflection point
Asset managers have spent the past decade talking about how blockchain technology and tokenization will revolutionize the industry. The use cases are clear: expand access through fractionalization and seamless global distribution; and realize operational efficiencies in product creation and maintenance.
While it won’t mark a revolution, 2026 will be a tipping point. Managers will finally start making critical choices around how and if they are going to play: whether to retrofit existing funds or build digital-native vehicles from scratch, build in-house or, more likely, sort from a variety of third-party providers, hone direct-to-investor distribution models, and determine which chains to leverage and which partners to select. The result? Tokenized real-world assets will finally crack the $100 billion barrier in 2026, up from roughly $37 billion today, and distance will open between leaders and laggards.
