Germany: Fund industry sees EUR 42 billion inflows in Q1
- Equity funds lead in sales
- Balanced funds attract inflows, property funds face outflows
- ETFs: new reporting approach with data for Germany, unmatched across Europe
In the first quarter of 2025, fund companies received net new inflows totalling EUR 42.2 billion. Of this, EUR 32.5 billion was channelled into open-ended retail funds, EUR 9.9 billion into open-ended Spezialfonds, and EUR 0.8 billion into closed-ended funds. Investors pulled EUR 1.0 billion from mandates. ETFs dominated the new business of retail funds with EUR 20.5 billion. Among asset classes, equity funds led with EUR 15.3 billion, driven by EUR 15.8 billion from equity ETFs, while actively managed equity funds saw outflows of EUR 0.5 billion. Bond funds recorded total new inflows of EUR 12.3 billion, with EUR 4.4 billion coming from bond ETFs. Balanced funds, which had recorded outflows from mid-2022 to the end of 2024, received EUR 2.5 billion in the first three months.
Property funds, however, saw investors withdraw a net EUR 2.1 billion.
The strong new business of ETFs reflects a change in the approach for reporting ETF data. Until the end of 2024, fund companies could only report ETFs that primarily targeted the German market. Other ETFs were generally excluded due to a lack of fund companies’ information on the distribution of national markets during ETF share issuance and redemption. The rapid growth of ETFs in recent years widened the gap between BVI-reported ETF figures and the actual German ETF market. To address this, BVI and fund companies issuing ETFs co-operate with the central securities depository Clearstream. Central securities depositories hold data on fund shares owned by investors at custodian banks. As of 31 March 2025, Clearstream recorded ETF assets held by investors in Germany totalling EUR 468 billion. Additional ETF assets are held with other central securities depositories, particularly Euroclear, contributing to the German market. With an estimated EUR 600 billion, Germany stands as Europe’s largest ETF market, surpassing the UK. Since not all fund companies with ETFs – regardless of a BVI membership – have adopted the new method based on Clearstream's database, BVI reports ETF assets of EUR 397 billion for the German market. The majority, EUR 321 billion, are equity ETFs, with the remainder predominantly bond ETFs. Due to the new method, comparisons of assets and new business with dates before 2025 are not feasible.
By the end of March, fund companies had a total of EUR 4,559 billion for investors in Germany. The lion’s share, EUR 2,181 billion, is allocated to open-ended Spezialfonds, exclusively for institutional investors such as pension schemes (EUR 776 billion) and insurers (EUR 522 billion). Fund companies had EUR 1,653 billion in open-ended retail funds, EUR 662 billion in mandates, and EUR 63 billion in closed-ended funds.
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