Where now for the UK funds industry?

Lawrence Gosling, founding editor of Investment Week, looks at what impact regulation - driven by the RDR - is going to have on the fund management industry.

It is always dangerous to predict where the asset management industry is heading. Over the past 30 years, many ‘commentators', including myself, have taken one change and extrapolated it into a seismic trend. In the 1980s, people predicted Japanese firms would be the major players in the UK fund management world, hot on the heels of the acquisition of what was then called Commercial Union by a Japanese institution. But while groups like Nomura have a good presence in the institutional market in the UK, there is an absence of others. So we move on to the 1990s when the world was going ...