The French institutional buyer map: who allocates, what they buy, and how long it takes

A German CEO once showed me his target list for France. It had forty names on it, all in one column, each with a tick box. Insurers, banks, multi-managers, a couple of pension schemes, a family office his cousin had heard of. He wanted to know which ones to call first.

I told him the list was the problem. Not the names — most of them were right — but the single column. In France, those forty names belong to at least five different worlds, with different buying processes, different calendars, different reasons to say yes, and, crucially, different reasons to never answer. Calling them in alphabetical order is how you spend a year and end up with a lot of polite silence.

This is the map I should have drawn for him.

The insurers, or where the money actually sits

Start here, because everything else in France eventually points back to it.

French households keep a very large share of their long-term savings in life insurance contracts, and a growing part of that is in unit-linked form, meaning the policyholder picks funds from a list the insurer has approved. That list is the single most powerful piece of distribution real estate in the country. If you are on it, several thousand advisers and every online broker can sell you without ever having spoken to you. If you are not, they cannot, no matter how much they like you.

What foreign managers get wrong is thinking the insurer is the buyer. The insurer is the gatekeeper. It maintains the list, runs the due diligence, negotiates the retrocession, and puts your fund through a committee that meets a few times a year. But it rarely adds a fund because it discovered you. It adds a fund because a distributor with real flows — a private bank, a CGP network, a broker — asked for you by name, and the insurer decided the demand justified the operational cost of listing you.

I know this from the inside. Between 2017 and 2022 my job at a French asset manager was precisely to build those insurer partnerships and get our funds through their committees, and the pattern never varied: the funds that got listed were the ones a distributor was already asking for.

So the insurer is the last door, not the first. Which brings us to who opens it.

The multi-managers, or the people who actually read your factsheet

France has a real fund-of-funds and multi-management industry, larger than most foreigners expect, sitting inside the big asset managers, inside some banks, and in a handful of independent houses. These are the closest thing you will find in Paris to a professional buy-side for funds.

They are also the easiest meeting to get and the slowest cheque to receive.

A multi-manager will take a call from a boutique with a credible track record, because looking at new managers is their job. They will ask sharp questions about capacity, about your risk process, about what happened in 2022. They will put you in their database. And then you will hear nothing for a year, during which you are on a watch list you don't know exists, being compared to three managers you have never heard of.

When they allocate, two things happen. The ticket is large enough to change the size of the fund. And the news travels: a French multi-manager's allocation is the reference that gets you past the compliance objection everywhere else, because it means somebody serious in Paris already did the work.

The mistake here is impatience. Managers who chase the multi-manager every month between the first meeting and the allocation train the selector to ignore them. The ones who send one useful thing every quarter, something the selector didn't have and can use, are the ones still on the list when a slot opens.

The private banks, or dozens of emails a week

Every French private bank has a fund selection team. Most of those teams are two to five people, covering every asset class, every geography and every wrapper, for advisers who want a short list and a good story.

They receive, from managers like you, dozens of unsolicited approaches a week. Not one of them is read for its merits. The selector scans for a name they recognise, a strategy they happen to be looking for right now, or a person they trust in the "from" field. Everything else is archived unopened, and I say this as someone who spent years selling to those very teams.

Private banks buy differently from multi-managers. The selection is less quantitative and much more about whether the adviser can explain your fund to a client in two sentences. A strategy that is brilliant but hard to tell will lose to one that is decent and easy. This is not a French quirk; it is what happens whenever the person who decides is not the person who sells. But France, with its dense network of advisers and its strong tradition of the adviser as trusted counsellor, pushes it further than most markets.

The private bank also has one habit that makes or breaks foreign managers: it wants you on the insurer's list before it recommends you, and the insurer wants the private bank's demand before it lists you. Breaking that loop is most of what a good local distributor does.

The CGPs, or the layer nobody explains to foreigners

Then there are the independent financial advisers, the conseillers en gestion de patrimoine, several thousand small firms scattered across the country, some with one adviser and some with fifty. Foreign managers either ignore them entirely or, worse, try to reach them one by one.

Neither works. Individually, a CGP moves modest amounts. Collectively, through their groupings, their platforms and their unit-linked contracts, they move very large amounts, and they do it with a loyalty to the managers who show up that institutions rarely match. A CGP who has met you, understood you and made money with you will keep buying you through two bad years. A multi-manager will not.

You reach them through the structures they belong to: the associations and groupings that organise their training and their conventions, the platforms that hold their clients' assets, and above all the insurers whose contracts they use. I ran a CGP distribution channel for five years and launched one from scratch, so I say this with some authority: it is a volume business, it needs a dedicated sales team on the road most of the year, and it is not the market a foreign boutique should try to open in its first two years in France. It is also not a channel Alforis covers today. I describe it because you will hear about it constantly, and because it is the reason the insurer's list and the CGP layer are two sides of the same coin.

The family offices, or the first ticket and what it is worth

Family offices deserve their own paragraph because they are where most foreign boutiques get their first French ticket, and because they are, for a boutique, the most accessible of the five worlds.

A French single-family office will take a meeting fast, decide fast, and allocate a modest but real ticket to something it finds interesting and can understand. There is no committee calendar to wait for, no unit-linked list to get onto, and a strategy that is unusual — which is often exactly what a boutique has — is an advantage rather than a problem. For a manager with no French name, the family office is where the track record in France starts.

What it is not is a reference for the other four. No insurer, private bank or multi-manager treats a family office's allocation as evidence of anything; it was a person who liked you, not a process that validated you. The mistake is not to go after family offices. It is to collect three of them and tell the board that France is open.

Take the ticket. Build the rest on top of it, not instead of it.

How long each one actually takes

If I put rough timelines on it, from first serious contact to first allocation, and assuming the strategy is genuinely good and somebody credible has made the introduction: a family office, three to six months. A multi-manager, twelve to eighteen months. A private bank, twelve to twenty-four months, mostly waiting for the insurer's list. An insurer directly, without distributor demand behind you, indefinitely. A CGP network through a platform and a listed contract, six to twelve months after the listing, which is itself the hard part, and which needs a sales force you do not have yet.

None of these run in parallel with each other in a simple way. The multi-manager's allocation shortens everyone else's timeline. The insurer's listing unlocks the private banks and the CGPs at once. Which means the order in which you approach the five worlds matters far more than how many of them you approach.

That German CEO's list of forty, sorted the right way, was really a list of six people to convince first. The other thirty-four would follow. He didn't need forty meetings. He needed the right six, and someone who could get him in the room.

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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.

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