PwC’s 2030 Outlook for Global Asset and Wealth Management Industry

PwC’s Asset and Wealth Management Revolution 2025 report sets out a clear baseline for the decade ahead: global assets under management (AUM) are projected to rise from about $139 trillion in 2025 to roughly $200 trillion by 2030.

That growth is driven by rising household wealth, deeper retirement systems, and broader participation in financial markets, especially in emerging economies. But the report is equally clear that this is not just a story of the industry becoming “bigger.” The composition of AUM, by product, client segment, and region, is changing in ways that will rearrange where revenues and profits are actually earned.

Traditional mutual funds and segregated mandates still represent the largest share of global AUM today and in 2030 in PwC’s base case. But their relative weight in industry revenues is slowly declining.

Two opposing ends of the product spectrum are shaping most of the change.

On one side, passive strategies are scaling rapidly. PwC projects that passive AUM will grow at about 10% a year to reach roughly $70 trillion by 2030. Regulatory support, fee transparency, and the simplicity of index-tracking products support this growth across both retail and institutional channels.

However, these flows come at lower fee levels. PwC’s analysis of total expense ratios (TERs) shows multi-year fee compression across active equity, fixed income, mixed funds and money market strategies, and continued downward pressure on passive fees as well. In other words, the scale in passive is significant but the revenue yield per dollar of assets is modest.

On the other side, alternatives are projected to expand to about $34 trillion of AUM by 2030. PwC expects private markets to generate more than half of total industry revenues by 2030, and notes that they currently earn around four times as much profit per dollar of AUM as traditional strategies.

These strategies are, however, more complex to operate. Alternatives typically rely on specialist investment and risk teams, alongside infrastructure that can support detailed valuations, reporting, and governance. As private markets are opened up to a broader base of individual investors, they also need structures that can accommodate this broader access, including semi-liquid and long-term fund formats that balance access with liquidity and regulatory constraints.

Taken together, PwC’s projections imply a kind of dual centre of gravity by 2030. On one side sit large, low-fee passive platforms that capture a significant share of net flows. On the other side sit operationally intensive alternatives platforms that contribute a disproportionate share of industry revenues and profit. Traditional active strategies remain important and substantial in terms of AUM, but they no longer define the core economic engine of the industry in the way they once did.

Regional picture: North America anchors, Asia-Pacific leads growth

The growth in AUM is not evenly distributed across regions.

• North America will remain the largest AUM market through 2030, supported by deep capital markets, established retirement systems, and high levels of financial-asset ownership.
• Europe continues to expand but at a more moderate pace, with a CAGR of 5.6%.
• Asia-Pacific is the fastest-growing region, with projected AUM CAGR of about 6.8%. PwC attributes this to new wealth creation in markets such as India, intergenerational wealth transfers across the region, and policy efforts in countries like Japan to move household savings into investments.
• Latin America and the Middle East & Africa also show attractive projected CAGRs of around 6.6% and 6.3% respectively, albeit from smaller base levels of AUM.

For global managers, this adds a geographical layer to the value-pool question. Incumbent markets such as North America and Europe remain central to revenues and profit, but incremental growth is tilting toward Asia-Pacific and selected emerging regions. The trade-off is that higher growth often comes with more complex regulation, evolving market infrastructure, and different political or currency risks.

Distribution and the importance of the client interface

Alongside the product and regional shifts, PwC highlights a structural change in how investors access products.

By 2030, the report expects greater convergence between asset management, wealth management, and fintech. Many asset managers already rely heavily on third-party platforms, model-portfolio providers, and separately managed account (SMA) programmes for distribution. PwC notes that this trend is concentrating buying power in fewer hands as platform-led and model-based distribution expands.

In that context, owning or sitting close to the client interface and to the data that flows through it becomes a key determinant of economics. Manufacturers without a strong brand, differentiated capability set, or solutions offering may find themselves trading margin for access as they negotiate shelf space and model inclusion.

PwC’s survey also shows that asset managers expect several structural trends to influence revenue growth by 2030. One is the increasing integration of wealth management and fintech solutions, as digital tools, advisory models, and investment platforms become more tightly connected. The second is the broader opening up of private markets to non-institutional investors through new fund structures and the use of tokenisation, which changes how access and minimum investment sizes are designed. The third is cross-sector convergence within financial services, where asset management, banking, insurance, and technology providers interact more closely across product, distribution, and data.

Taken together, these developments point to an environment in which the way investors access products, and the channels through which those products are delivered, could matter as much as the underlying strategies themselves.

Reading the map to 2030

Taken together, PwC’s projections describe an asset and wealth management industry that is larger, more geographically diverse, and more technologically enabled by 2030. But they also show that growth and economics are diverging:

• AUM is broadening across regions and client types.
• Revenues and profits are concentrating in specific combinations: large passive platforms, profitable private-market and alternatives franchises, and integrated solutions ecosystems that sit close to the client.

For firms, the challenge is less about whether the overall industry is expanding and more about where within that expansion they are positioned. For allocators and asset owners, the question is which managers’ business models are most aligned with the value pools that the report suggests will matter most through the decade.

What the PwC work does not do is make prescriptive judgements about which strategies “should” win. It sets out a data-backed picture of how AUM, revenues, and profits may evolve if current trends in savings, regulation, and product development continue. The underlying message is that the industry’s value pools are moving, and that understanding those shifts is now as important as tracking headline AUM growth.

Chief Brand & Investor Relations Officer

Sneha Dadrwal

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What does PwC project for the global AUM of the asset and wealth management industry by 2030?

A: PwC’s base case projects that global AUM will rise from about $139 trillion in 2025 to roughly $200 trillion by 2030, supported by rising wealth, deeper retirement systems and broader participation in financial assets.

Q: How does the product mix change in PwC’s forecast?

A: Traditional mutual funds and mandates remain the largest pools by AUM, but their share of industry revenues declines. Passive strategies grow fastest, reaching around $70 trillion of AUM by 2030, while alternatives expand to about $34 trillion and account for a disproportionately large share of revenues and profit.

Q: Why do alternatives matter so much in the outlook?

A: PwC estimates that private markets already generate roughly four times as much profit per dollar of AUM as traditional strategies and will deliver more than half of total industry revenues by 2030, even though they are a minority of total AUM.

Q: Which regions drive most of the AUM growth to 2030?

A: North America remains the largest AUM market, but Asia-Pacific is projected to grow fastest with a CAGR of about 6.8%, supported by new wealth creation, intergenerational transfers and policy efforts to move savings into investments.

Q: What is the main takeaway from PwC’s 2030 outlook?

A: The report suggests that while AUM is broadening across regions and client types, revenues and profits are concentrating in specific combinations. Understanding these shifts matters as much as tracking headline AUM growth.

Sources

PwC, Asset and Wealth Management Revolution 2025 – “The profitability paradox: Competing for relevance and returns”.