Frontier has been engaging with fund managers across Australia and globally for more than three decades, building a deep understanding of the investment landscape and the evolving dynamics of the funds management industry. Through numerous meetings each year, we assess and evaluate managers not only for their capability but also to gain insight into their perspectives on markets, strategies and broader industry trends. Each year, we invite the funds management community to participate in our annual fund manager survey, now in its twelfth iteration having first run in 2014. The survey provides a snapshot of industry sentiment, expectations, and predictions, offering valuable insights into the evolution of the investment sector. By comparing responses from fund managers and Frontier staff, we foster a collaborative and competitive dialogue that enriches our understanding of market dynamics … and we generate some fun competition for good measure!
Backdrop
The Australian superannuation landscape remains one of the most sophisticated and rapidly evolving institutional investment systems in the world, reaffirming superannuation as the dominant pillar of the nation’s capital markets. Although just one sector, the superannuation system’s maturity continues to shape both the demand for, and delivery of, institutional investment management services across the board. The superannuation industry has changed significantly during the life of this survey and it continues to evolve, marked by significant consolidation and internalisation during this time. The result is a landscape dominated by fewer, larger funds, each with substantial investment teams. This consolidation has profound implications for external fund managers, consultants and service providers. Scale has shifted bargaining power decisively toward asset owners, compressing fees and raising expectations for transparency, data integration and bespoke solutions. But it’s not all bad news for fund managers. At the same time as fund consolidation and internalisation has gathered pace, money continues to flow into the Australian superannuation system with assets under management growing almost two and a half times over the period of our survey history – specifically, from $1.85 trillion in June 2014 to $4.3 trillion in June 2025. Therefore, while consolidation has reduced the number of super funds, the total pool of assets has grown substantially, and the funds that remain are far larger. Fund managers can benefit because their remuneration rises with the volume of funds they manage. But asset consultants that don’t run their own investment products, like Frontier, don’t share in that scale or growth. In this paper, we analyse the findings of the 2025 fund manager survey, which captures the perspectives of 83 fund managers, along with Frontier’s consulting team, on key industry themes, including investment performance, asset class preferences, internalisation trends and fee pressures.
