FS Investments, an alternative investment manager, announced Tuesday it entered into an agreement to acquire Chiron Investment Management, a global multi-asset investment firm with a quantitative bent.
Philadelphia-based FS manages more than $24 billion in assets across a suite of private growth and income funds. Chrion, a roughly $1.8 billion firm based in New York City, offers three actively managed funds (two mutual funds and one UCITS product) that employ what it calls “quantamental” investing by merging quantitative techniques and strategies with fundamental implementation.
Executives at both companies say the acquisition will help them address what they see is growing demand among financial advisors for actively managed investment solutions in hard-to-access corners of the market.
“Among financial advisors there’s great demand for goals-based investment solutions, particularly model portfolios,” says Mike Gerber, senior managing director of corporate affairs at FS. “It’s easy to build model portfolios with index funds, and that’s easy to do with ETFs. But nobody has really brought sophisticated research both from a fundamental and a quant research perspective for active, long-only, idiosyncratic strategies, and match that with alternatives. And those are our two respective areas of expertise, so we feel we’re well-positioned to be one of the leading asset managers over the next several years by building these holistic solutions for financial advisors.”
Chiron co-founder and chief investment officer Ryan Caldwell echoed that thought during an interview with Gerber. “When we think how this transaction benefits advisors, it’s about moving to where active asset management has to go. And that’s the place providing asset allocation solutions and combining liquid strategies with private market securities and funds,” he says.
Gerber says the acquisition will enable FS to scale Chiron’s current platform and make it available to more financial advisors across the country and internationally. “And by combining our areas of expertise, we’ll be able to build out model solutions,” he adds.
Caldwell posits that the industry is moving away from relative benchmarking as being important to goals-based investing.
“What advisors are starting to talk about is what are the returns needed to meet goals, not what’s the relative performance of an individual product,” he says. “That’s where we’re lining up to go. When you look at people who are at the vanguard of total client solutions, we want to be at the table to do that. That was the push behind the transaction.”
Terms of the deal—which is expected to close in next year’s first quarter—weren’t disclosed.