A €2,000 billion market, and a different meaning of “wholesale”

French life insurance held €2,107 billion at the end of 2025. €666 billion of that sat in unit-linked contracts, the part that actually buys funds. When a foreign asset manager says it wants to “do wholesale in France”, this is usually the number in the background.

It is also where the first misunderstanding starts. In Germany, wholesale and retail describe how a fund is sold. In France, “wholesale” describes who buys: the private banks, and the fund selection units that sit inside them. It is a client type, not a distribution method.

France has three buyers, and they do not read the same document. Institutional investors (insurers, pension schemes, multi-managers) decide through a CIO or a selection committee, sometimes through a formal tender. Private banks decide through a fund selection unit, and then the private banker presents the fund to the client. Independent advisers, the CGP, are reached through platforms, where referencing is the gate. That last market works differently and is not the subject here.

In the middle one, the private banks, the part of the chain that matters looks like this.

Fund selection unit	→	Private banker	→	Life insurance contract	→	Final client
Approves the fund		Recommends it		Holds it		Invests

The selection unit approves the fund, the banker recommends it, and in most cases the recommendation ends up inside a life insurance contract. The fund has to pass the first filter before anyone at the bank can talk about it.

The wrapper then decides the economics. In life insurance, part of the management fee is passed back through the insurer to the distributor. In the PEA, the equity savings plan, the bank bills its own management fee and the fund is held through a clean share. The same strategy therefore needs different share classes, and a different paperwork trail, depending on the wrapper.

One caution on the headline figure. The €2,107 billion covers every channel of life insurance, not only private banks. Private banks are one door into it. A manager who reads that number as the size of its wholesale opportunity will overestimate it by a wide margin.

The practical consequence is on the material. The English institutional deck works for a CIO. It does not work for a private banker, who needs something short, in French, written from the distributor’s side: why this fund belongs in a client portfolio, in words the banker already uses. Without that document, the selection unit’s opinion of the fund changes nothing. It never reaches the client.

Sources: France Assureurs (January 2026), ACPR – Banque de France.

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Michel Marques is the founder of Alforis Finance, a Paris-based third-party marketing firm and member of the AFTPM. He spent nineteen years in French banking and asset management, the last eight at the asset management arm of Crédit Mutuel, where he built the CGP and insurer partnerships and then ran the EMTN distribution business for institutional clients and private banks across France, Belgium and Luxembourg. He launched Alforis in 2025.

Related: [The French institutional buyer map] · [CGPs, unit-linked lists and platforms]