Investment management, is the professional management of various securities (shares, bonds etc) and other assets (e.g. real estate), to meet specified investment goals for the benefit of the investors. Investors may be institutions (insurance companies, pension funds, corporations etc.) or private investors (both directly via investment contracts and more commonly via collective investment schemes e.g. mutual funds).

The term asset management is often used to refer to the investment management of collective investments, while the more generic fund management may refer to all forms of institutional investments as well as investment management for private investors. Investment managers who specialize in advisory or discretionary management on behalf of private investors may often refer to their services as wealth management or portfolio management often within the context of so-called “private banking".

The provision of “investment management services" includes elements of financial analysis, asset selection, stock selection, plan implementation and ongoing monitoring of investments.

The fund manager (or investment advisor in the U.S.) can be both defined as the firm which provides investment management services or the individual(s) who direct the 'fund management' decisions.

The activity of investment management has several facets, e.g., employment of professional fund managers, research (e.g. of individual assets and asset classes), dealing, settlement, marketing, internal audit, the preparation of reports for clients. The largest financial fund managers, or institutions, are complex financial firms with all the complexity that their size demands.

Apart from the people who bring in the money (marketing) and the people who direct the investment (the fund managers), there are compliance staff (to ensure that no laws or financial market regulations are broken), internal auditors of various kinds (to examine internal systems and controls), financial controllers (to control the institutions’ own money and costs), computer experts, and the “back office" (the people who track and record transactions and fund valuations for sometimes literally hundreds or thousands of clients per institution).

The most successful investment firms in the world have probably been those that have been separated physically and psychologically from banks and insurance companies. That is, the best performance and also the most dynamic business strategies (in this field) have generally come from independent investment management firms.

At the heart of the investment management industry however are the individual fund managers whose job it is to invest and divest client monies. Typically, if we take the example of a segregated account run for a single client (as opposed to a pooled account run for several or many clients), then the fund structure has to be determined and implemented.