Cut to the Cantons, where Geneva-based asset management group Unigestion has announced, together with Zurich private equity (PE) boutique Akina, a merger of their PE businesses “to create a leading specialist in global small and mid-market PE, which will have US$6 billion in assets under management”. The deal, as the Unigestion announcement explains, is all about “Unigestion’s commitment to building a world-class multi-specialist institutional boutique asset management firm”, as well as simply upping its AUM, “to more than $23 billion, of which PE will represent 25%, making it the second-largest pillar of its investment offering, alongside equities, alternatives and multi asset”.
Akina describes itself as both “an investment adviser to European PE programmes focussing on investing into small and medium-sized businesses” and “your partner for PE in Europe”, with a “Zurich-based investment adviser and a Luxembourg-based alternative investment fund manager”. According to its profile, Unigestion has attracted 2.5 billion euros ($2.6 billion) for its programmes and mandates since 1999, from more than 100 qualified investors around the globe. It offers “a range of primary and secondary fund and direct investment programmes for an international clientele of institutional and qualified private investors”, insisting that its SME (small to medium enterprise) focus reaches potentially lucrative areas of the European economic landscape that are difficult to access or inefficiently valued. Unigestion, clearly an advocate of the same thesis, emphasises that “there will be no change to the investment strategy of existing products of either Unigestion or Akina, but there will be cross-representation on the two PE investment committees”.
Unigestion is still well down the list of even Swiss asset managers, compared to giants like UBS Global Asset Management, Pictet Asset Management, or Union Bancaire Privée, whose AUMs dwarf even its enlarged capital. What is interesting is that they should fix on PE as their way to differentiate and grow, and should diversify from a more traditional asset manager into an alternatives-heavy house, while Wall Street PE majors are moving in the opposite direction, taking on hedge funds and other capabilities and pension giants like CalPERS are somewhat winding down their PE exposure. True, an asset manager is not a pension fund, and has a whole different set of priorities, targets, timescales and obligations to work with. Nonetheless, you do wonder if Unigestion knows something those pension funds have forgotten, or can see some potential they don’t; especially if you can start at the low end and work your way up, and up, and up…
