How many mandates has BlackRock lost due to ESG?
BlackRock lost several high profile mandates during 2025 because of its supposed lack of commitment towards ESG. So we look at the numbers and see how much of a problem it is proving for the world’s largest asset manager. (Bing Guan/Bloomberg)
Good morning. Last year ended with the news of BlackRock losing several high profile mandates over its position on ESG.
Two Dutch pensions - the $295bn PFZW and the $70bn PME Pensioenfonds - both pulled money from BlackRock because they felt its commitment to tackling climate change was wavering.
On top of this, New York City’s comptroller announced the city’s pension systems should sever ties with BlackRock for similar reasons.
This of course all stems from Donald Trump’s re-election in 2024 and the suspicion that his administration’s dislike of ESG has filtered down into corporate America in general, and US fund houses in particular.
This got us thinking about whether there was a wider trend taking place so we had a look at the data for 2025 from our sister title MandateWire (caveat up top here that the data will be missing the last few weeks of the year).
It is certainly true that during 2025 BlackRock saw a lot of mandates terminated: 33, the second highest amount behind Legal & General’s punchy 62.
But once you net this out with the mandates it won, the fund house gained nine. L&G, by contrast, didn’t win enough to make it back into the black and lost a net of 24 mandates during 2025.
BlackRock’s net number certainly isn’t terrible - Invesco, T Rowe Price and Columbia Threadneedle all join L&G as having made net losses in mandates - but it could be better.
State Street won a net of 19 and JPMorgan won a net of 28. The big winners of 2025, though, were the private equity shops: for example KKR won 31, Blackstone won 32 and Ares Management won 25.
For the sake of completeness, we thought we would look into MandateWire’s coverage to see why these mandates were terminated to see if ESG was a big problem for BlackRock and it turns out the answer was ‘no’.
In only 7.5 per cent of cases - ie two cases - was ESG explicitly given as reason for terminating a mandate.
Investment decisions by the asset owner (ie choosing to go passive or active, choosing to allocate away from a given asset class and so on) accounted for 23 per cent of BlackRock’s terminations while pension scheme buy-in also accounted for 23 per cent.
Incidentally pension scheme buy-in accounted for 73.5 per cent of L&G’s terminations, which perhaps shows the most consequential decision by a pension fund for an asset manager isn’t its ESG policy at all.
