Institutional Asset Manager
Overview
Institutional Asset Manager is a London-based news service for institutional investors and asset managers. It publishes fund industry news, features and analysis for the institutions that allocate capital at scale, pension funds and their managed funds above all, and for the asset management firms that compete to run that money. The title has been bringing news to the institutional asset management industry since 2013.
The service began as one of the specialist newswires of Global Fund Media, the London publisher of titles for the institutional investment marketplace, and it is now published by Chandler Publishing under managing editor Beverly Chandler, alongside its sister title ETF Express. Its daily file covers the business of institutional investing: mandates, appointments, fund launches, regulation, service providers and the strategic direction of the asset management industry.
Origins within Global Fund Media
Global Fund Media was founded in 2002, originally as Hedgemedia Ltd, launching Hedgeweek and then building a portfolio of specialist newswires covering all asset classes within the institutional investor marketplace. Institutional Asset Manager took its place in that family as the title covering institutional pensions and managed funds, alongside Property Funds World for property funds, ETF Express for exchange traded funds, Hedgeweek for hedge funds, Private Equity Wire for private equity and Wealth Adviser for private client wealth managers, family offices, trustees and their advisers.
The group's model was to serve the whole institutional investment chain with daily news and information on mainstream and alternative asset classes, and Institutional Asset Manager addressed the largest pool of all: the pension funds and institutional mandates whose investment decisions shape asset managers' businesses. The title's own account dates its service to the institutional asset management industry from 2013.
Transition to Chandler Publishing
The title's publishing arrangements changed as its sister titles were reorganised. In October 2021, Global Fund Media announced the editorial buy-out of ETF Express and Wealth Adviser, under which Beverly Chandler and her team took responsibility for those titles. Institutional Asset Manager subsequently came under the same editorial leadership: Chandler Publishing is described as publishing two titles, ETF Express and Institutional Asset Manager, with Beverly Chandler as managing editor of both.
Chandler is an experienced financial journalist and publisher, with a career spanning national newspapers, specialist investment titles and books on hedge fund investing. Under Chandler Publishing, Institutional Asset Manager has continued its news, newsletter and awards activities, and since 2023 the publisher's Off the Record podcast has represented both of its titles, bringing commentators, analysts, issuers and service providers from across the global asset management industry into conversation.
Editorial Focus
Institutional Asset Manager's coverage follows the working concerns of institutional investors and the firms that serve them. News includes pension fund investment decisions and governance, asset manager appointments and business developments, fund launches aimed at institutional buyers, developments in fiduciary management and outsourced investment, and the growth areas of the industry such as private markets, sustainable investment and liability-driven strategies.
Features and interviews give asset managers, consultants and service providers space to explain positions on questions that occupy institutional buyers: how funds of funds must justify their fees, how model portfolios are constructed, how financial centres compete as fund domiciles, and how managers communicate with the end investors whose money they run. That blend of daily news and practitioner commentary is the title's characteristic format.
Audience
The readership is professional and institutional. It comprises pension fund executives and trustees, investment consultants, asset managers and their distribution and product teams, and the service providers, administrators, custodians, lawyers and technology firms, whose businesses depend on institutional mandates. The title's newsletter, signed by its managing editor, is addressed to that community, and its content assumes professional knowledge of investment structures and regulation.
Serving this audience gives the title a particular function. Institutional investment is a relationship-driven, low-visibility market in which mandates are won through consultant ratings, reputation and long procurement processes. A trade news service that reports appointments, strategy changes and industry argument provides the shared information layer on which that market's participants track one another.
Awards
Institutional Asset Manager runs awards recognising excellence in institutional asset management and its supporting industries. Its 2024 awards, for example, included the award for Best Offshore Fund Domicile, won by Guernsey Finance, an illustration of the programme's breadth: categories reach beyond fund performance to the jurisdictions, administrators and service providers that make up the institutional ecosystem.
As with other specialist financial awards, the honours carry weight in winners' own communications: recipients announce them in press releases and marketing, citing the title as an authority on the industry. The awards also create an annual focal point around which the title's readership community gathers.
Newsletters and Digital Presence
The title publishes online at institutionalassetmanager.co.uk, with daily news and features, and distributes a regular newsletter carrying its latest coverage and editorial commentary to subscribers. Its digital operation is that of a modern trade title: a continuously updated website, email distribution, and social channels through which stories and podcasts are promoted.
The Off the Record podcast, produced by Chandler Publishing since 2023 and running to dozens of episodes, is a notable extension of the brand. Episodes are typically conversations between Beverly Chandler and industry figures, asset managers, centre executives and product specialists, covering subjects from model portfolios and active fixed income to fund domicile competition. The podcast format lets the title carry longer, more discursive analysis than the daily news flow allows, and episodes are distributed through mainstream podcast platforms.
Syndication and Group Distribution
During its Global Fund Media period, the title benefited from the group's distribution arrangements. In 2013, Global Fund Media's daily news coverage and in-depth special reports across its titles were the subject of an extended content agreement with LexisNexis, bringing the group's asset manager and wealth management intelligence to subscribers of the Nexis research service. Institutional coverage of pensions and managed funds formed part of that combined offering, which the group described as spanning all mainstream and alternative asset classes.
The group's titles were collectively presented as the output of the largest online news publisher serving institutional investors and wealth managers at that time, a claim that rested on the combined reach of the newswire family of which Institutional Asset Manager was a part.
Geographic Scope
Published from London, Institutional Asset Manager covers an industry that is global in organisation even where its roots are local. Its stories move between the United Kingdom's pension market, European fund centres such as Ireland, Luxembourg and the Channel Islands, and the global asset managers headquartered in the United States and elsewhere who compete for institutional mandates. Interviews and features regularly address offshore domiciles and international financial centres competing for fund business, reflecting where its readers' decisions are actually made.
Significance
Institutional Asset Manager occupies a specific niche in financial journalism: the trade press of the pensions and institutional investment world. Decisions taken by pension funds and their managers affect the retirement incomes of millions of people, yet they are rarely visible in general news coverage. A dedicated title recording mandates, managers, strategies and industry debate since 2013 provides the professional record of that world.
Its history also mirrors the restructuring of specialist publishing itself: created inside a multi-title group built around asset-class newswires, and continuing under a smaller, editor-led publisher alongside ETF Express, with its brand extended into podcasting. For the directory, it stands as a representative example of the United Kingdom's institutional investment trade media.
