T. Rowe Price Bets Big on Fixed Income With F/m Deal

Rowe, rowe, rowe your boat, gently toward fixed income.  

T. Rowe Price will acquire F/m Investments, a fixed income asset manager and exchange-traded fund specialist with about $19 billion under management, according to an announcement on Thursday. The move will expand T. Rowe’s fixed income offerings and is expected to close next year. It’s the second ETF manager acquisition this month, following Goldman Sachs’ announcement that it planned to acquire NEOS Investments, after closing on its acquisition of Innovator Capital Management in April.   

“Overall, [T. Rowe Price is] a massive investment manager, but they’re really heavily weighted on the equities,” said Neil Bathon, a managing partner at FUSE Research Network. The deal “bolsters a fixed income business that needs probably more balance in order to be seen and actually being able to deliver those customized solutions.”

A Rising Tide

F/m was the first firm to offer single-security ETFs, as well as the first to file an application for tokenized ETF shares and to launch mutual fund shares of ETFs. T. Rowe’s distribution capabilities will allow F/m’s funds to scale at a level that they wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, said Alexander Morris, co-founder of F/m. “They always tell you the first billion is the hardest, then it’s the second, the third. Well, turns out it’s still true at the 19th and the 20th,” said Morris. “We didn’t want to just keep growing at a few billion a year. It’s how do we 10x this?”

Here’s the deal by the numbers:

• It’s expected to increase T. Rowe’s fixed income AUM by about 9%. 
• However, the deal will more than double the firm’s fixed income ETF assets under management, as well as expand its fixed income SMA business.  

Wave It Off: Despite Goldman’s recent acquisitions, the deal doesn’t signal a larger wave of consolidations, according to both Bathon and Morris. “Consolidation is a story advanced by M&A groups,” said Bathon. “There are as many firms today as there were 20 years ago … This [deal] is opportunistic and strategic, and I don’t know that I think it plays into a broader consolidation theme.”