CGPs, unit-linked lists and platforms: the French adviser layer, explained to foreign asset managers

Somewhere in your second week of meetings in Paris, a selector will say something like "of course, for the CGPs it's a different story", and nod as if you both knew what that meant. You will nod back. Then you will go back to the hotel and search for it, and find several thousand small firms with names ending in "Patrimoine" and no obvious way in.

I spent five years inside that layer, first defining a fund range for it at a French asset manager, then launching the channel from scratch and running the platform and insurer relationships that make it work. This is what I would have liked someone to explain to me before I started, and what I now explain to every foreign manager who asks. It is not a channel Alforis sells into today, and I will say at the end why I think that is the right call for a boutique's first years in France. But you cannot understand how French money moves without understanding it.

What a CGP actually is

A conseiller en gestion de patrimoine is an independent financial adviser: a regulated intermediary who advises private clients on their savings, their retirement and their estate, and who places their money in products manufactured by others. There are a few thousand firms, from the sole practitioner in a provincial town to the group with fifty advisers and a Paris head office, and they are organised in professional associations that handle their compliance, their training and their yearly conventions.

The thing to understand is that a CGP is not a buyer in the sense a multi-manager is. A CGP does not run a portfolio of funds with an allocation process and a watch list. A CGP has clients, each with a life insurance contract or two, and picks funds from the list that the contract offers, based on what he understands, what he trusts, and what he can explain to the client across a kitchen table. He is, in effect, the last salesperson in the chain, and the only one who actually meets the end investor.

That changes everything about how you would reach him.

The three structures that decide what a CGP can buy

A CGP cannot simply decide to buy your fund. Three structures sit between his intention and your share class, and all three have to say yes.

The first is the insurer. Most CGP assets sit in life insurance contracts, and a contract carries a list of unit-linked funds — the fameuses unités de compte — that the insurer has approved. If you are not on the list of the contract the CGP uses, he cannot hold you for that client, whatever he thinks of you. Getting onto those lists was the core of my job for five years, and it works the way I described in the article on the buyer map: the insurer's committee adds a fund when a distributor with flows asks for it, and then negotiates the retrocession that pays for the listing.

The second is the platform. Between the insurer and the CGP sit a handful of platforms — some owned by insurers, some by banks, some independent — that aggregate the contracts, handle the paperwork, and give the adviser a single screen for all his clients. A platform has its own fund universe, its own onboarding, its own due-diligence questionnaire, and its own opinion about whether a fund nobody has asked for deserves a place on the shelf. Being on the insurer's list without being on the platform the CGP uses is a common and frustrating situation.

The third is the grouping. Many CGPs belong to a network or grouping that negotiates with insurers and platforms on their behalf, runs the training days, and, increasingly, maintains a recommended list of its own. A grouping's endorsement moves hundreds of advisers at once. Its absence means your fund is technically available and practically invisible.

None of these three structures cares about your Sharpe ratio. They care about whether somebody with flows wants you, whether your documentation is in French and complete, whether your retrocession is in line with the market, and whether you will show up.

Why showing up is the whole business

This is the part foreign managers underestimate most. A CGP buys managers he has met. Not managers he has read about, managers he has met, at a convention, at a regional breakfast, at the training day his grouping organised, where someone from the fund stood in front of thirty advisers and explained in plain French what the strategy does and when it will disappoint.

That is why the channel needs a dedicated sales force on the road most of the year. When I built it, the calendar was the strategy: which conventions, which regions, which groupings, which insurers' sales meetings, and a kit for the advisers — pitch, compliance material, training deck — that had to be rebuilt every time the offer moved. It is a volume business, measured in hundreds of meetings and thousands of small subscriptions, and it rewards the managers who are there year after year with a loyalty no institution will ever give you. A CGP who has explained your fund to his clients and been proven right will keep you through a bad period, because dropping you would mean admitting to his clients that he was wrong.

It is also, for exactly those reasons, the wrong place for a foreign boutique to start.

Why you should not start there

A boutique entering France has a small team, a strategy that needs explaining, and a budget for perhaps one person on the ground. Put that person in front of CGPs and three things happen.

First, nothing moves for a year, because you are not on the insurers' lists, and the insurers will not list a fund no distributor is asking for, and the CGPs cannot ask for what they cannot hold. Second, the person spends their time on the road in regions where nobody has heard of you, explaining a strategy to advisers who need it to fit in a single sentence, which yours may not. Third, when the first subscriptions arrive they are small, they are many, and they come with a servicing burden — French-language documentation, reporting, questions — that a boutique is not staffed for.

Meanwhile, the multi-managers and the private banks, who could each write a ticket that changes the size of your fund and who are the ones the insurers listen to, have not been called, because your one person was at a convention in Lyon.

The right order is the reverse: selectors, multi-managers, private banks and family offices first, because they create the demand; the insurer's listing second, because it follows the demand; and the CGP layer last, once the fund has a French track record, a French reference and the resources to service volume. At that point it becomes one of the most loyal sources of assets in Europe. Before that point, it is a very expensive way to learn French geography.

What Alforis does with all this

We do not run a CGP sales force, and we say so on the first call, because a manager who needs one should hire it or partner with a house that has it, and I can tell them who.

What we do is use what the channel taught me. When we build the private-bank version of your story — the one that has to survive being retold by someone who did not write it — it is the CGP's kitchen table I have in mind, because that is the hardest audience in France and a story that works there works everywhere. When we approach an insurer for a listing, we know which distributor's demand the committee will want to see first, and we go and create it. And when a manager asks whether the CGP market is for them, we give the honest answer, which is usually: not yet, and here is what has to happen first.

If you have heard the word CGP in every meeting and still do not know what to do about it, that is a reasonable place to start a conversation.

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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] · [What entering France actually costs]