Putnam enters Australian market
Rothschild Australia Asset Management (RAAM) will hand over more than $800 million of its international equity investments to US manager Putnam Investments early next year in a deal announced yesterday.
Rothschild Australia Asset Management (RAAM) will hand over more than $800 million of its international equity investments to US manager Putnam Investments early next year in a deal announced yesterday.
RAAM’s managing director Peter Martin says the alliance, which will include both retail and wholesale products, is indicative of the growing number of Australians wishing to invest overseas. He says the move will complement Rothschild’s do-mestic asset offerings. The deal will allow RAAM to take advantage of “Putnam’s broad and deep toolbox of high quality investment options” to make available to its clients, he says.
Putnam Investments is the fifth largest fund manager in the US. It manages US$370 billion, two thirds of which are invested in equities, for more than 12 mil-lion retail investors as well as about 1,000 institutional investors. It has no direct distribution, preferring to work through third parties such as the banks, brokers and financial advisers.
Martin says the next few months will see the bedding down of the agreement, with the possibility of developing new product.
“We’ll be talking about products by the end of the first quarter next year,” he says.
The term of agreement will initially stretch for three years, though Martin says there are “plans on both sides that it lasts in perpetuity”.
Martin says the joint venture is a logical step for the two groups, who both share “a strong service culture”. He concedes that, while Rothschild’s global performance has been solid, the group preferred to outsource its global equity business to Put-nam in lieu of the US manager’s better performance in this area.
Putnam Investments’ managing director and chief of international distribution and business development John Boneparth says his group’s international business has grown about 400 per cent in the last three years.
He says Putnam’s move into Australia was part of its “proactive opportunism” ap-proach to overseas markets.
“We’ve been focussing on Japan and Europe for the past few years. Australia has been on our radar screen, though,” Boneparth says.
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Samantha Walker
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