State Street Renames Dozens of ETFs Ahead of 401(k) Play

The itsy-bitsy SPDR went off the ETF.

The company behind the world’s first ETF recently removed SPDR from 15 funds and replaced it with State Street. It also added State Street to dozens of others without trimming SPDR from the name. The changes follow the company’s wider rebranding earlier this year, when it switched from State Street Global Advisors, which it often abbreviated as SSGA, to State Street Investment Management.

“There was potentially some confusion in the market. What’s SSGA? … What’s a global advisor?” Allison Bonds Mazza, head of US Wealth at State Street Investment Management, told ETF Upside at the Charles Schwab Impact conference in Denver. “We were trying to create some clarity around the brand.” 

World Wide Web

A fun (but sadly inaccurate) myth is that a person is almost never more than three feet from a spider. It might be truer that in a crowd, someone’s near a person whose portfolio includes SPDR ETFs. State Street is the third-largest ETF issuer by assets, with about $1.8 trillion across 175 US products. The firm brought the first US ETF to market in 1993, with the S&P 500 Depository Receipt, which is where the SPDR acronym comes from. Of course, that product is today known as the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY), and at $700 billion in assets under management is the company’s largest and the third-biggest in the US. Unlike most of the companies awaiting approval by the Securities and Exchange Commission for ETF share classes of mutual funds, State Street is going the other way, with plans to roll out 401(k)-friendly mutual fund share classes of its ETFs, Bonds Mazza noted. That would give the company a massive new distribution opportunity for the popular, low-cost retail strategies currently available only as ETFs.

It’s not the first time State Street has renamed a range of ETFs:

• Back in 2007, the company brought its streetTracks line of ETFs under the SPDR name.
• That, like this year’s rebranding, was intended to make the products more identifiable with State Street, according to a Reuters report at the time.

SPY vs. SPYM

SPY was not affected by the rounds of name changes, although its cousin, the State Street SPDR Portfolio S&P 500 ETF (SPYM), was. This year, there has been plenty of attention on SPY, which has seen more than $20 billion in net outflows year to date, according to data from VettaFi, as rivals like iShares Core S&P 500 ETF (IVV) and Vanguard S&P 500 ETF (VOO) have raked in new money, at $32 billion and $105 billion, respectively. But that story has ignored the growth of SPYM, which charges 2 basis points compared with SPY’s 9 but has a different use case, Bonds Mazza said. Year to date, that ETF has brought in $30 billion.

“I don’t know why SPYM is an undertold story,” she said. “I think we’re taking market share from VOO and IVV.”