Fund firms' national accounts teams are expanding, according to new research from the folks at a consulting ally fundsters. Watch for further expansion.

Loren Fox Fuse Research Network LLC Director of Research

On Tuesday (July 29), Loren Fox, director of research at Fuse Research Network, highlighted findings from Fuse's National Accounts 2025: A Guide to Benchmarking, Budgets & Productivity report, which was released on July 22. (The Fuse team has been issuing iterations of the report for more than a decade.)

This latest report draws on the 2025 Fuse National Accounts Survey. The Fuse team found that the average fund firm now has 9.5 national accounts team members; that's up by 1 from the average in the prior five years. Large firms (with retail AUM of more than $100 billion each) now have an average of 18.6 national accounts team members each, versus 7.5 each for mid-sized firms ($25 billion to $100 billion in AUM each) and 6.8 each for small firms (under $25 billion in AUM each).

"National Accounts teams will continue to slowly grow to respond to the gradually increasing importance of home office relationships and placement in model portfolios. That growth will be best visible over a number of years, as growth rates will vary from year to year," Fox writes to MFWire via email. "The jump in 'average' team size from 8.5 in 2024 to 9.5 in 2025 is unusually large, and we're more likely to see next year's average team size rise to 9.6 than to 10.5."

As for what types of national accounts roles fundsters are hiring for, the Fuse team revealed yesterday that 32 percent of surveyed national accounts leaders plan to add a junior national accounts manager over the next 12 months. 14 percent plan to hire a senior national accounts, 14 percent plan to hire a regular (i.e. non-junior, non-senior) national accounts manager, and 7 percent plan to hire a national accounts chief.

"Junior National Accounts Managers have really come into their own in recent years. It's a positive trend for the industry, as it provides a more structured pipeline of emerging talent," Fox writes. "Junior National Accounts Manager roles exist at 75% of asset managers now and they're going to become even more widely used." 

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