The Asset Management Industry in 2010

When viewed from 30,000 feet,the pace of change in the asset managementbusiness can appear almost glacial. Year after year,it seems,the industryturns out enviable,solid performance – indeed,our research shows that over-all profit margins have held remarkably stable over the past market cycle,justshy of the 30 percent mark. And while their relative positions may shift mod-estly,the same roster of familiar names tends to resurface time and again inthe industry's annual rankings of dominant players.But that's only the bird's eye view. Drill deeper,and a very different pictureemerges – one in which a handful of powerful forces is already spurring dra-matic change at the individual firm level. Customer needs are changing fun-damentally,driven on the retail front by the looming retirement of the biggestdemographic wave in our country's history,and on the institutional side by acombination of worsening pension deficits and a significantly differentapproach to evaluating – and paying for – performance.