Asset Manager Website Localisation: Do Big Asset Managers Speak Your Language?

Notes from a European Operator · Distribution · Original study

I crawled the websites of 135 asset managers to see which European countries they claim and which language they use there: asset manager website localisation, measured rather than asserted. Size buys reach. It does not buy the local language.

Victor Roodhorst · roodhorst.eu · October 2026 · 10 min read

BNP Paribas Asset Management has a country page for Poland. Its code says the page is in Polish. The text on it is English from top to bottom. I found it while running a study of asset manager website localisation: I took 135 managers, from BlackRock to Cobas, crawled their websites, and recorded every European country each site points to and the language it uses there.

The pattern is clear. The bigger the manager, the more countries its website claims, and the more of those countries it addresses only in English. Firms with €500bn or more serve 35% of their declared European markets in English only. Under €50bn, that share is 5%.

The measure

What a website declares, and what it says there

For every firm I started at its global homepage and collected every European country the site points to: language versions, country selectors, country domains and the standard country addresses, checked against made-up controls so a site that answers any address does not get credit. Then I read each country page in full and scored its language on the page body, not the menu: local, mixed, or English only.

That gave 799 firm-market pairs across 128 readable sites. The 121 firms with a published AuM figure manage €81.9 trillion between them. Seven sites could not be read (bot walls, timeouts). They sit in their own bucket and count as nothing.

One distinction matters for everything below. A declared market is a claim the website makes. It is not a count of fund registrations or clients.

The size effect

Bigger firms claim more countries, and more of them in English

Across the 121 firms with a published AuM figure, the Spearman correlation between assets and the number of European markets a website declares is 0.64. Between assets and the number of markets served only in English, it is 0.63. Between assets and the share of markets served in the local language, it is minus 0.43.

The median firm with €500bn or more declares 16 European markets. The median firm under €50bn declares one. Breadth comes with size. Local language does not come with it.

Firms with €500bn or more that serve the most declared European markets in English only

Firm	AuM	Markets declared	English only	Including
T. Rowe Price	€1.7tn	20	17	Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Netherlands
BNP Paribas AM	€1.6tn	27	13	Netherlands, Poland, Czechia, Greece
UBS Asset Management	€2.0tn	23	11	Netherlands, Belgium, Denmark, Norway
DWS	€1.2tn	17	8	France, Belgium, Denmark, Sweden
State Street	€5.5tn	20	8	Spain, Belgium, Poland, Sweden
PGIM	€1.3tn	17	8	France, Netherlands, Spain, Belgium

Some of these pages are English by design: professional-investor sites in smaller markets are often run that way, and nothing in this study says that is wrong. Others are harder to explain. DWS lists France and serves it in English; its French address returns a 404. A further 44 markets across all firms are mixed, like BNP Paribas AM’s Italian page, where less than a third of the page body is in Italian.

The exceptions

Some of the largest firms do speak the language

Size makes English-only pages more likely. It does not make them necessary. Franklin Templeton declares 28 European markets and serves 21 of them in the local language. Invesco serves 20 of 26. Schroders serves 11 of 13. BlackRock, the largest firm in the sample, serves 16 of its 22 locally.

Mid-sized houses show the same choice from the other side. Carmignac, with €41bn, declares 15 markets and serves 12 of them locally. Flossbach von Storch serves all seven of its markets in German, French, Italian or Spanish as each market needs.

Those firms prove the English default is a decision, not a law of scale. Somebody chose to build and maintain the local version, which is structural work: translation is the cheap part, keeping fund documents, legal notices and news current in six languages is not. The localise, translate or rebuild framework is how I would decide, market by market, which of the three each country actually needs.

The Belgium test

Belgium is a two-language market. 13 of 34 firms treat it as one.

Belgium is the market I know best, and it is a fair test: retail and wholesale clients expect Dutch in Flanders and French in Wallonia and Brussels. 34 firms in the sample list Belgium. 13 serve it in both Dutch and French. 12 serve it in English only.

The English-only group includes UBS Asset Management, DWS, State Street, T. Rowe Price, PIMCO, HSBC Asset Management, Generali Investments, Insight Investment, PGIM and Dimensional. For a professional-only site that can be a sensible call. For anyone selling to a Belgian private bank’s advisers, the answer to “do you have this in Dutch?” is usually the first question in the room.

The local champions

Small firms go deep, not wide

I added 66 strong local and regional players to the original panel, many of which never show up in AI answers about European asset management. Of the 63 I could read, 37 declare a single market. Of the 18 Spanish managers I could read, 15 declare only Spain: Cobas, Santalucía AM, Bestinver, CaixaBank AM and Kutxabank among them. Their pages are in Spanish.

That is not a weakness. Under €50bn, 92% of declared markets are served in the local language. These firms decided where to compete and then spoke to that market properly. The same habit separates the strongest homepages in my rendered audit of 1,385 financial homepages: the copy is written for one reader, not translated for many. You can test your own opening line against that sample.

The stress test

I tried to break the finding. It held.

Spearman correlation between AuM and English-only markets, by cut (95% bootstrap interval)

Cut	Firms	Correlation	95% interval
All firms with an AuM figure	121	0.63	0.52 to 0.73
Without estimated AuM figures	112	0.64	0.51 to 0.74
Without estimates and Spanish fund-only figures	95	0.63	0.47 to 0.73
Stricter rule: local language must be the majority of the page	121	0.63	0.52 to 0.73
Firms with more than one market only	68	0.63	0.47 to 0.75
Without the five largest firms	116	0.60	0.46 to 0.70
European headquarters only	106	0.52	0.37 to 0.65
Original panel only	65	0.67	0.53 to 0.78

The checks changed the data before they confirmed the result. The first pass read pages from their menus, and BNP Paribas AM’s German pages came out as English. Country domains caught strangers with the same name: a hotel in Sorrento, a medical device company in Germany and an accounting firm in Wallonia all briefly counted as asset manager country sites, until I read 106 of those domains by hand and dropped 61. Rereading every country page in full, rendering more than 360 pages in a browser and testing the local-language twin of every English-only address moved several firms. The direction never changed. When in doubt, the rules count a market as local, so the English-only numbers are a floor.

The operator read

A country page in English is a decision. Make it on purpose.

Coming from B2C, where every market got its own landing page and its own test, I expected the largest firms to be the most local. The opposite is true, and I understand why: a firm present in 27 countries has 27 sets of fund documents to keep current, and English is the version that is always up to date. That is a resource trade-off, and in some markets it is the right one.

The Language Gap study, a cut of the Observatory readings, showed that AI engines build different shortlists in different languages. A country page in English is what those engines read when somebody in Utrecht or Liège asks about you in their own language. So the decision now covers the machines as well as the advisers. It deserves a line in the distribution engine, next to every other channel choice.

The operator question

Which of your country pages would you defend in that country’s language?

List every country your website declares. Mark each one local, mixed or English. Then ask whether each English page is there because you chose it, or because it was the version nobody had to update.

Asset manager website localisation: frequently asked

What is asset manager website localisation?
Putting a manager’s country pages into the language and the proof of each market, instead of serving one English version with a different country label. This study measures how far 135 asset managers get.

Do larger asset managers localise their websites more?
No. They declare more European markets, but serve more of them in English only. Across 121 firms, the Spearman correlation between AuM and English-only markets is 0.63, and between AuM and the share of markets served in the local language it is minus 0.43.

How many markets do the largest asset managers serve in English only?
Firms with €500bn or more serve 35% of their declared European markets in English only, against 18% for firms between €50bn and €500bn and 5% under €50bn. Markets whose language could not be read are excluded from these shares.

Which large asset managers localise most?
Franklin Templeton serves 21 of its 28 declared European markets in the local language, Invesco 20 of 26, BlackRock 16 of 22 and Schroders 11 of 13.

How do asset managers handle Belgium?
34 of the firms studied list Belgium. 13 serve it in both Dutch and French, 7 in one local language, 12 in English only, and 2 could not be read.

Does a declared market mean a firm sells there?
No. A declared market is a country the firm’s own website points to. It is not a count of fund registrations or clients.

Victor Roodhorst writes Notes from a European Operator and publishes original studies on how European financial services actually markets. He works from the regulated-operator seat, not the agency one.