Victory Capital Brings the Pioneer Investments Brand Back From Extinction
After an acquisition by Victory Capital, Amundi US is being renamed in honor of the longstanding fund business it acquired in 2021.
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Dire wolves — the fluffy white apex predators featured in Game of Thrones that died off over 12,000 years ago — may have been brought back from extinction by a gene-editing company this week. And that’s not the only news of a worthy comeback.
Pioneer Investments has been brought back from the dead after a deal between Victory Capital and Amundi led to a rebranding. It’s part of a distribution play with benefits for two major asset managers. For advisors, it means a wider range of investment capabilities available under one roof.
Company DNA
Victory Capital assumed ownership of Amundi US in exchange for a roughly 26% stake in Victory’s business this month. Now, the $119 billion in assets-under-management Amundi US line is being rebranded as Pioneer Investments. (Amundi acquired Pioneer in 2017 and carried the Pioneer branding until 2021.) But the deal is hardly another M&A or asset-management-industry consolidation story, as it’s a distribution play for both Victory and Amundi on a global scale, said Mario Favetta, relationship manager at Fuse Research Network. For investors and advisors, “it expands the product set that’s available to them from the combined team at Victory and gives them a lot of new capabilities to fill out an allocation, particularly with fixed income,” he said.
Victory has 12 investment franchises and has built up its business in part through major acquisitions. In 2018, for example, it snapped up USAA’s $69 billion asset management business. Under the terms of the Victory deal closed on Monday:
- Paris-based Amundi gets to distribute Victory’s US active management products outside the US.
- Amundi supplies its foreign strategies for Victory to distribute within the US.
- Victory’s assets under management reach $300 billion.
An Evolving Business: The structure of the agreement is all about distribution, but there are other important aspects, and the return of Pioneer is notable, Favetta said.
“It’s a smart move for them. The Pioneer brand had a long history. It was very well-respected,” he said. “Most advisors who are in the business today remember the Pioneer brand. There is a lot of equity remaining in the Pioneer brand.”
