M and A
INTERVIEW: UK Specialist Investment House Seeks New Brand Identity
The chief executive
of SVG
Investment Managers is looking for a new, distinctive name
for this
business after its parent, UK-based SVG Capital, agreed to sell
it to Swiss-headquartered
Hansa Aktiengesellschaft.
Hansa, which has
more than $1.8 billion of assets, has agreed – subject to
regulatory clearance –
to buy a business which has around £200 million ($309 million) of
assets. Hansa
will be the majority stakeholder in SVGIM, with the senior
management of SVGIM
holding a significant minority stake. Hansa will also acquire SVG
Capital’s
holdings in certain SVGIM managed funds.
"We will have a new brand
that is recognisable as us," Adam Steiner, SVGIM’s CEO, told
this
publication in an interview. He said that it was necessary to
distinguish
between the firm and the old parent, SVG Capital, which
is very much a private equity business.
"Hansa decided that it wanted a team in London and looked
for one with cash-flow
based investing with large-caps and a constructive engagement and
shareholder
activism approach."
"They [Hansa] can access
our skills and management, mostly in public equities. Their large
shareholding
will fund growth in our business,” he continued, arguing that
SVG
IM's work in advisory and discretionary asset management will
benefit,
he said.
Although not central to the
Hansa reason for buying SVG, the Retail Distribution
Review has benefited those asset managers able to put consistent
strong
performance and quality on the table, as SVG has been
able to do, he said.
"People will look even more
at you with your risk-adjusted numbers," he said. "The emphasis
with
us remains on quality and performance not gathering of assets,"
he said.
"We want to retain our style of investing,” he said.
"We look at what firms are
worth, not just in what you see from the public equity side, but
from a trade
buying and private equity point of view as well.
In terms of scale, the fund
management firm could grow to £500 million or so in the next few
years, but given
its specialist form of investing, there is an upper limit on AuM
in its UK corporate
engagement strategy, he said.
"A couple of billion is more than
enough for us to work effectively,” he added.
