In the field of fund sales, giants such as Ant Fund and China Merchants Bank have occupied a dominant position in the market with their strong channel advantages and traffic resources. However, with the intensification of market competition, institutions such as fund sales subsidiaries and brokerages are facing huge challenges. This article will delve into the breakthrough of the fund sales industry under the encirclement of giants, analyze the changes in the current pattern of fund sales channels, and how small and medium-sized institutions can find new growth points through professional services, technology empowerment and differentiated strategies.
From the perspective of professional counterparts, first of all, think of public offering sales subsidiaries, and their own products are the most understanding and attentive. In June 2025, E Fund Management Fund Sales (Guangzhou) Co., Ltd. was approved for establishment, becoming the ninth fund sales subsidiary in the market. Since the establishment of Harvest Wealth in 2012, this exploration has gone through 13 years. However, the presence of fund sales subsidiaries in the market is minimal.
As of the end of 2024, only three fund sales subsidiaries have entered the top 100 public fund sales and holdings of fund sales institutions in the whole market. CEIBS Wealth ranked first among fund sales subsidiaries with an equity fund holding scale of 5.5 billion yuan, but only ranked 73rd in the entire sales field. (The other two public offering sellers who entered the TOP100 are Huaxia and Harvest)
Image source: Asset Management Association of China official website
At the same time, Ant Fund’s equity fund holdings in the first half of 2024 have reached 738.8 billion yuan, and China Merchants Bank has 410.5 billion yuan.
The direct sales channels of public funds are also showing a trend of complete collapse year by year. In March 2025, China Life Security Fund announced that it would terminate the operation and maintenance services of its App at the end of the month. This is just the latest example in the wave of public offering shutdowns – in 2024, a number of public offerings such as Caitong Fund, Everbright Prudential Fund, and Changsheng Fund have successively launched mobile clients. As the “old ten”, Changsheng Fund is sighing, whether it is its net asset value of 86.128 billion yuan of funds, which has not yet exceeded 100 billion, or the helplessness of the mobile APP going offline.
Some market views say that the main reason why some small and medium-sized public offerings have closed their direct selling App platforms is that the sales are relatively small, the traffic is low, and the cost of maintaining the APP is relatively high, resulting in disproportionate input and output.
The original idea of the fund sales subsidiary was to form a voice to compete with traditional channels such as banks.The reality is a cruel pattern of “separation of production and marketing” – banks, securities firms and independent agency agencies have formed a three-legged monopoly situation.
The author believes that this is not a simple high-level decision, and the logic behind it and the problems it faces are worth pondering. In the past 10 years, driven by the wave of mobile Internet, driven by the vision of fund companies,The efforts of the e-commerce/online finance/digital finance departments finally ushered in the final review under the realistic constraints of “channel is king, traffic first”.
To achieve these three challenges, product managers will only continue to appreciate
Good product managers are very scarce, and product managers who understand users, business, and data are still in demand when they go out of the Internet. On the contrary, if you only do simple communication, inefficient execution, and shallow thinking, I am afraid that you will not be able to go through the torrent of the next 3-5 years.
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According to the latest industry data at the end of 2024, the pattern of public fund sales channels shows the following key changes:
The channel pattern has changed drastically: the head camp has solidified, and the growth differentiation is obvious
1. Ranking of equity fund holdings
- Ant Fund ranked first with 738.8 billion yuan, an increase of 6.8% month-on-month (an increase of 46.8 billion yuan from the first half of the year).
- China Merchants Bank ranked second with 410.5 billion yuan, down 12.21% month-on-month, and the gap with ants further widened.
- Tiantian Fund ranked third with 349.3 billion yuan, but the scale was only 47.28% of Ant, and the gap continued to widen.
2. Growth institutions against the trend are scarce
Among the top 20 institutions in terms of equity fund holdings, only Ant Fund and Chinese Life Insurance achieved positive growth, while the rest generally contracted, and the overall market share of banking channels fell by 6.23 percentage points.
Index fund battlefield: brokerages dominate, banks accelerate catch-up
Equity index funds have become the core track, with a total scale of 1.7 trillion yuan in the second half of 2024, an increase of 25.3% month-on-month. Look at it by channel:
Brokerage is absolutely ahead:
- CITIC Securities topped the list of brokerages with 109 billion yuan (accounting for 80% of its equity products), and 7 brokerages including Huatai Securities (108.7 billion yuan) and China Merchants Securities (53.3 billion yuan) ranked among the top ten in the industry.
- The total number of brokerage channels was 982.7 billion yuan, with a market share of 57.7%.
Third-party institutions: Ant Fund ranked first in the market with 320.1 billion yuan, accounting for 18.8% of the total scale of the industry.
Banks are catching up:
- The number of equity index funds reached 192.3 billion yuan, a surge of 43.9% month-on-month (the fastest growing channel).
- China Merchants Bank and ICBC alone increased by more than 10 billion yuan, and the scale of China Merchants Bank reached 58.2 billion yuan.
On the index battlefield, it is worth noting that the author paid attention to the merged Cathay Pacific Haitong Securities, after summarizing the caliber of the statements China Taijunan and Haitong Securities, its index fund held only 77.8 billion yuan, even if the equity was only 96 billion yuan,Under this classification index with a very high amount of “weight”, it barely squeezed into the top three brokerage subdivisions.However, it still has a long way to catch up with CITIC’s 109 billion yuan index and 135.7 billion yuan of equity, and Huatai Securities’ 108.7 billion yuan index and 120.2 billion yuan of equity.
As a new leader of the brokerage, the author is very much looking forward to Cathay Haitong Securities (a newly built aircraft carrier-level brokerage) being able to squeeze into the top 10 of the overall list with the help of the indexed guidance of supervision, its own integration reform, and the AI empowerment of large models. At present, its 96 billion yuan equity scale just surpasses Chinese Life Insurance (95.1 billion yuan), ranking 11th overall. At that time, the three brokerages of CITIC, Huatai, and Cathay Pacific Haitong surrounded the Agricultural Bank of China (the skinny camel is bigger than a horse, 130 billion yuan), to earn back some face for the securities industry.Get the top 10 seats in the equity category to achieve a real three-point world.
Challenges for banking channels: The weakness in the index field has not been fundamentally reversed
Despite the impressive growth rate of bank index funds, the total amount of holdings (192.3 billion yuan) is still less than 60% of Ant Fund (320.1 billion yuan), and the overall market share of banks is only 11.3%, far lower than that of brokerages (57.7%) and third parties (29.9%). The dilemma stems from:
1. Shortcomings on the market: ETF trading requires securities accounts, and banks rely on over-the-counter feeder funds, which are less flexible than brokerages.
2. Customer preference mismatch: Bank customer groups have low risk appetite, prefer bond-based and stable products, and index funds are slow to penetrate.
- Ant: Firmly sitting on the top spot in the retail end, leading both the index and active equity;
- Brokerage: With the advantages of on-market ETFs to dominate the index track, the market share continues to increase;
- Banks: Accelerate the transformation of index products, but need to break through the limitations of customer groups and scenarios.
The way to break through: professionalism-oriented, technology-empowered, and service-winning
In the context of channel monopoly (represented by banks) and traffic control initiative (represented by three parties), the way out for the product sales of fund sales subsidiaries and even securities firms lies in the combination of professional depth and service temperature. The advantage of Ant and China Merchants Bank lies in platform traffic and user experience, which is precisely the shortcoming of fund companies and brokerages.
However, on the track with increased weight, the author believes that in the long run, the key to breaking the game may lie in in-depth service and professional configuration. As industry insiders said, brokerages and fund companies need to “make up for or even reverse the trading needs that are difficult to fill by simple fund sales through investment advisory and asset allocation capabilities.”
For high-end customer groups, simple fund sales can no longer meet their wealth management needs. The asset allocation of these clients needs to cover various types of targets such as stocks, bonds, insurance, trusts, funds, etc., and even comprehensive tools such as family offices. This is exactly the professional field that brokerages and fund companies can deepen, especially in the process of transforming the form of wealth of our country residents from real estate to equity assets.
In an era where channels are king, professional investment advisory capabilities may be the only weapon for brokerages and fund companies to break the encirclement of ants and CMBs. Although this road is difficult, it is the only way for the securities fund industry to return to its roots and achieve high-quality development.
If you want to kill the bloody road, you must show three game-breaking blades.
1. Reshape the buyer’s gene: make the assessment of investment advisors “fund managers”
At present, the fund sales industry is deeply trapped in the “curse of scale”: some leading sales subsidiaries still hold a scale weight of more than 70% in the KPI in 2024, resulting in the investment advisory team having to give “scale” suggestions “against their will”. This sales-oriented assessment mechanism is a serious departure from the origin of wealth management.
The key to breaking the situation lies in the assessment system:
- Account profit is included in core indicators: the assessment weight of indicators such as customer account rate of return and profitable customer ratio is increased to more than 50%, forming a check and balance with the scale of holding.
- Implement long-term assessment: synchronize with the new regulations of the China Securities Regulatory Commission on the assessment of fund managers, and implement rolling evaluation of investment advisory performance for more than three years to avoid short-term trading impulses.
- Establish a multi-dimensional evaluation matrix: introduce non-financial indicators such as customer retention rate, asset allocation fit, risk control compliance rate, etc., and pilot the “customer wealth health” scoring system.
Only when investment advisory income is deeply bound to customer income can the buyer’s position be truly practiced. This requires breaking the path dependence of “scale is justice”, so that the investment advisory team dares to refuse irrational subscriptions and dare to suggest take profits and stop losses.
2. Transparent marketing: Use “self-exposure of its shortcomings” to establish a sincere personality
Industry marketing has been trapped in a vicious circle of “reporting good news but not bad news” for a long time: a star fund product page displays “32% return in the past year” in huge font, but marks “maximum drawdown of 41%” in the corner with No. 6 characters. This selective disclosure has long overdrawn investor trust.
Transparent Marketing Practices:
- Risk pre-disclosure: For example, the “maximum drawdown repair time” is mandatory on the product page, and a fixed income + product clearly states “the maximum drawdown in the last 12 months is 7.2%” on the top screen of the subscription page.
- Public review of mistakes: Will any fund company release the “Fixed Income Team Operation Reflection Report” after the bond market fluctuates? Dare to analyze in detail the decision-making chain of misjudgment of central bank policies, the influence of this content is definitely far beyond conventional product promotion.
- Unified persona of the whole platform: The new media matrix adheres to the principle of “not beautifying the performance curve”, displays the complete fluctuation chart of a technology fund since its establishment on the Douyin account, and strives to obtain the “official account that dares to tell the truth the most”.
It is often said that funds make money but the people do not make money, and the author sincerely believes that instead of simply investing in and teaching customers to make fixed investments and talk about the smile curve, it is better to generously display the “maximum drawdown repair time” of their own products. There is always only the wrong purchase, not the wrong sale, in the context of information asymmetry, sincere service is greater than any marketing package.
If the fund manager can dismantle his mistake in misjudging the new energy sector in the live broadcast, the author believes that he will be able to see the barrage of “finally waiting for the live broadcast that dares to admit his mistake”.Transparency is not about self-destructing the Great Wall, but about rebuilding the cornerstone of trust with professional confidence– After all, no investor will believe in the “god” who is always right.
3. Data intelligence + AI-driven: build a golden bridge between the demand side and the supply side
As the closest hub to investors and connecting to investment research, brokerages and fund sales subsidiaries hold the key to breaking the game: user behavior data. However, most institutions are still in the original stage of statistical subscription and redemption amounts and supervision and assessment.
Bilateral Upgrade Data Strategy:
Specific implementation path:
- Dynamic demand capture: Track the difference in the time limit of user rebalancing (such as operations within 72 hours after the market crash) and the threshold for position fluctuations (automatically record the combined drawdown value when the user redeems) under the premise of compliance.
- Establish a behavioral driver model: With the help of AI capabilities, a customer redeemed after the CSI 300 rose more than 5% three times in a row, which may be due to “take-profit anxiety”, and feedback to the investment research team to develop an “automatic segmented take-profit” tool.
- Precise upgrades on the supply side: When data monitoring shows that the combination of “pension target fund + medical service” for the customer group aged 30-40 surges, it can promote the product department to develop the theme FOF of the combination of medical and nursing care.
- Information closed-loop construction: Transform the forward-looking research and judgment of the market (such as the prediction of the inflection point of U.S. Treasury yields) into a short video of “Investor Operation Guide”, and use the path of artificial views, AI creation, and material generation to accurately push to related customers through the community.
The key to breaking the game consists of three parts: useBuyer assessmentLet the investment advisor and the interests of the client be at the same frequency, useTransparent personalityRebuild the foundation of the industry’s broken trust, withAI intelligencePenetrate the cognitive barriers of production and marketing.
The breakthrough of fund sales,The essence is to jump out of the “scale involution” and return to the original intention of “customer interests first”.The industry has gradually stopped being superstitious about traffic myths, and it is rare to turn to deeply cultivate the relationship between professional value and trust. Even if the moat built by Ant and China Merchants Bank is wider, it will eventually be broken through by differentiated and innovative play.
Under the general trend of increasing the proportion of equity wealth and the development of indexed investment, the author believes that wealth management is a thing.Sincerity is more powerful than channel control, and professionalism is more valuable than the third-party traffic price.Technology and AI, manufacturing marketing algorithms are not the goal.A better understanding of customers, more service touchpoints, and a better and more convenient investment experience are.
Is it really the final judgment? AI Agent brings new changes
On the one hand, it simply removes the direct sales APP from the shelves, and on the other hand, it increases IT investment in AI large models.The essence of fragmentation and conflict is the old problem of traffic business, superimposed on the new problem of innovative services.
Brokerage funds are currently facing the double attack of depletion of new traffic + loss of existing customers, which is only a manifestation of their own business problems. Fundamentally, after 30 years of rapid development of the industry, especially under the high customer base brought by the mobile Internet in the past 10 years,The company’s supporting facilities are already a huge organization, system redundancy, and bloated personnel, but it is facing the growth stall of future customers entering the station + distribution restrictions on both overseas services, and the substantive resource misallocation and idling anxiety.
In the author’s opinion, no matter how powerful the platform functions and excellent user experience are, without continuous user access and high-frequency immersive use, the leading game represented by the APP is still a limited competition and limited game.
On the contrary, who will have new user touchpoints in the future, especially in the context of rapid iteration of AI intelligence, who occupies the newly born traffic aggregation entrance,Whoever takes the lead in going to sea will break the first, second, and third island chains represented by PC/Web, App, and WeChat.Acquire more high-stickiness users and create an era of high-quality growth for brokerage funds.
As the author talked about in the “Securities Company Intelligent Hand Rubbing Guide” series, if you don’t follow new technology trends and new scenarios, you will get off the table! Looking back on the author’s practical experience in the securities industry, we have deeply discussed the topics of investment advisory productization and product investment advisory, and have also been briefly mentioned in the article on the transformation of wealth management of securities firms and the application of AI large models.
essentiallyThe productization of investment consulting first solves the problem of productivity supply.Just like the investment advisory modules (combinations, opinions, live broadcasts, etc.) built around platforms such as Youpin Technology and Sidi Information back then. Then, it beganThe construction of product investment advisory to adapt to the reshaping and reconstruction of production relations after the development and transformation of productive forces.The products launched on the platform have effectively provided customer value, and naturally have done a solid job in investment advisory services and investment advisory income generation.
Different from the previous logic of creating productivity first and then rebuilding production relations, in the face of the menacing AI Agent, the author suggests following the path of first confirming production relations and then improving productivity.
The author once said in the securities company’s intelligent body hand rubbing guide (practical chapter-1) that agents can also be summarized into the category of “products” at this stage, and AI products are still and inevitably good products without the AI part. From this point of view, product AI is to give priority to building the interaction and relationship between AI and people, and take advantage of the current mass base of at least one AI assistant.Build practical and effective scenarios that are in line with business reality and process practice, hook customers and build trust.In the future, we will simultaneously promote the construction of AI products, such as the direction of AI equipment bet by OpenAI, supplementing capabilities and extending hardware.Starting from the business scenarios of brokerages and funds, we will innovate the interactive touchpoints of customers, improve the quality and efficiency guarantee and substantiation of productivity, and enclose the excellent experience of investment.
Previously, the author initially peeked at the business layout of Huatai Securities (Suzhou), GF Securities (Guangzhou and Shenzhen), and CICC (North) under the new technology of AI Agent, and next, let’s take a look at which brokerage firm in Shanghai stepped forward.
