Wall Street Loses its Grip on Asset Management

Custodians are striding in to fund management as banks fade out of the sector.

Fund management businesses owned by investment banks have been losing their grip on client assets over the past decade, according to figures from the UK’s Investment Management Association (IMA).

Figures in the organisation’s annual asset management survey showed the investment banks that looked after 18% of all UK clients’ money in 2003, were responsible for just 11% of it last year.

“What we now see emerging is a far more independent asset management industry,” said the Investment Management Association. Retail banks have also lost ground, moving from 19% to 5% in the same period. Several large players in this sector either collapsed during the financial crisis or were forced to curtail their fund management operations.

“What we now see emerging is a far more independent asset management industry, less characterised than it has been in the past by large in-house investment management companies owned by banks and insurance companies,” the IMA’s survey said.

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The main drivers to this have been a structural shift relating to “the changing nature of the asset management industry, which is now much more clearly defined as a discipline in its own right, as opposed to a port of another financial services set,” along with some companies backing away from non-core functions after the crisis, the IMA said,.

Some investment banks have cut their fund management ties—Barclays sold its BGI business to BlackRock, for example—whereas others have ceased to exist. This has reduced the number of Wall Street players, who may have taken up the slack of their peers.

In 2003, Goldman Sachs reported global assets under management of $373 billion, whereas Morgan Stanley said it had $462 billion. By 2013, Goldman Sachs Asset Management oversaw $1 trillion from global investors, with Morgan Stanley only looking after $373 billion—but with a further $692 billion from wealth clients taking it past the $1 trillion mark. The banks saw their global client assets rise 168% and 116% respectively, while the IMA said UK-managed assets rose 127% in the same period.

Independent fund managers and those categorised as “others”, which includes custodian banks, have seen their share of client assets rise over the past decade, from 15% to 37% and 6% to 15% respectively.

By way of an example, in the decade to 2013, Northern Trust’s global assets under management rose 193% from $302 billion (before the purchase of Deutsche Bank’s passive business) to $884 billion, while BNP Paribas’ asset management arm saw its client money  increase 191% from €127 billion to €370 billion, according to their annual reports.

The full IMA survey can be found on the organisation’s website.

Related content: Blackstone Tops Wall St Peer Rankings & IMA CEO: Troubleshooting Short-Termism, One Country at a Time

Former SAC Manager Handed Nine-Year Jail Term

Mathew Martoma is the seventh ex-SAC Capital employee to be convicted of insider trading.

A former portfolio manager with SAC Capital Advisers has been sentenced to nine years in jail for insider trading.

Mathew Martoma is the seventh former employee of SAC to be convicted and received the longest sentence. He was found guilty in February of making $275 million for SAC through insider trading relating to two pharmaceuticals stocks.

He plans to appeal the sentence, according to Bloomberg.

Sentencing Martoma in Manhattan yesterday, District Judge Paul Gardephe said the lengthy sentence was driven by the scale of the gains made from the illegal trades. On top of the $275 million made for SAC, Martoma was given a $9.4 million bonus linked to the trades. He has been ordered to forfeit this amount.

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The case forms part of a wider insider trading investigation by Manhattan Attorney Preet Bharara into insider trading at hedge funds, which has so far resulted in 81 convictions. Of those convicted, only two have received longer sentences than Martoma—one of them is Raj Rajaratnam, founder of Galleon Group, who was sentenced to 11 years in jail in October 2011.

In a statement, Bharara said: “Today’s sentence of a lengthy prison term is well-suited to the audacity of the illegal trading in this case. The long and short of Mathew Martoma’s trading is that he traded his liberty, his name, and his time with his family for what in the end is nothing.”

SAC Capital Advisors rebranded as Point72 Asset Management in March this year, after agreeing to pay $1.8 billion and plead guilty to charges including securities fraud as part of a settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). It slashed its staff numbers from 3,000 to 850, and three senior staff, including President Tom Conheeney and Chief Compliance Officer Steve Kessler, have left the firm this year.

Founder and CEO Steven Cohen is also subject to an administrative proceeding from the SEC, accused of failing to supervise his employees. He has not been charged with any crime.

The SEC announced in July that it was investigating 44 investment firms for alleged insider trading activities in a separate operation.

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