When capital moves, funds launch, mandates change hands, and ultimately, teams start to grow. Few areas of financial services reflect this cycle as clearly as fund administration today.

As one of the busiest markets Broadgate currently serves, demand for fund administrators has risen alongside the meteoric growth of private assets, now estimated at around $20tn (a tenfold increase since 2007, according to JP Morgan).

The long-term expansion of private capital structures has increased the volume, lifespan and complexity of funds that require administration, creating sustained hiring demand across the sector.

Below, we take a close look at what’s shaping the fund administration talent market and what these conditions are likely to mean for your hiring plans this year.

Capital Spends More Time Private

Companies are staying private for longer, with their median go-public age increasing to 13 years in 2025, up from 10 in 2018.

Rather than moving quickly to public markets, growth is increasingly financed through private equity, private credit and hybrid structures.

For fund administration, this moves the workload from time-bound vehicles to longer-lived, operationally intensive funds that require sustained support.

Hiring implications:

Demand increasingly tends to favour candidates who can support funds across longer lifecycles, rather than short-duration launch or wind-down phases.

Asset Class Convergence

Boundaries between asset classes are becoming less distinct. Fund structures increasingly combine elements of private equity, real assets, credit and structured finance within a single vehicle or platform.

For example, in Luxembourg, it is common to see umbrella funds combining private equity, private credit and real asset strategies within a single structure.

Frameworks such as RAIFs and SIFs allow these strategies to sit in legally ring-fenced compartments under one vehicle, each with its own investment focus and investor base.

This convergence is changing how funds are built and how they need to be supported operationally.

Hiring Implications:

Hiring managers are increasingly favouring administrators who can support multiple compartments within an umbrella structure, rather than candidates aligned to a single strategy. Experience across onboarding, capital activity and varied reporting requirements often carries more weight than narrow asset-class specialism.

Mandates and Timing Risk

While macro trends shape the volume of work entering fund administration, hiring pressure is often triggered by very specific events.

New fund launches and mandate wins continue to be the clearest catalysts for resourcing decisions.

Once a mandate is secured, delivery timelines are typically fixed. Onboarding, reporting and investor servicing requirements leave little room for delay, which can compress hiring timelines if recruitment is left too late.

A recent example is the continued rollout of ELTIF 2.0, which has prompted a wave of new fund launches aimed at a wider pool of investors.

While product design has evolved, the operational requirements remain substantial, placing immediate resourcing pressure on fund administration teams once mandates are secured.

Hiring implications:

Hiring demand often materialises in short, defined windows following mandate activity. Teams that wait until onboarding is underway may find themselves competing for a narrower pool of experienced candidates, particularly at mid to senior levels.

Rising Regulatory Complexity

The amount of work required to support each fund continues to increase. Regulatory reporting, investor transparency, data quality, stakeholder communication, and audit expectations have all become more demanding, particularly for private capital structures that were historically less standardised.

This is especially visible as funds move closer to retail or semi-liquid formats, where reporting cycles are tighter and tolerance for error is lower.

Even where fund volumes remain stable, the operational workload has continued to rise.

Hiring Implications:

Roles are being broadened, with greater emphasis on end-to-end ownership, audit readiness and stakeholder interaction, even where this reduces flexibility to hire more junior profiles.

Turning Market Change into Hiring Decisions

From our perspective, the most effective hiring strategies are those grounded in a clear understanding of where demand originates, how mandates convert into resourcing pressure, and where teams are most exposed as complexity increases.

If you’d like to discuss how these dynamics are playing out in your organisation, or what they may mean for your hiring plans this year, Broadgate's hiring team is always happy to share perspectives from across the market.

Please reach out directly for a confidential conversation:

Elliott Snowball, Head of Fund, Corporate & Trust Services:  elliott.snowball@broadgatesearch.com

Scarlett Worthington, Accounting, Finance, Risk, Governance and Compliance specialist: scarlett.worthington@broadgatesearch.com