Family Office
Nuveen completes Santa Barbara acquisition
Asset manager nabs stable-growth play to complement Rittenhouse
offerings. Nuveen Investments has acquired growth-stock portfolio
manager Santa Barbara Asset Management. Chicago-based Nuveen
Investments says that Santa Barbara’s stable-growth strategy – a
top-quartile performer against peers for the past one-, three-,
five- and ten-year periods – makes nice fit with the growth plays
of its Rittenhouse subsidiary.
“The addition of Santa Barbara reinforces our commitment to
provide investors and the financial advisors who serve them with
access to a range of high-quality investment specialists,” says
Nuveen Investments' CEO Tim Schwertfeger. “Santa Barbara's
investment solutions will expand our growth product line-up and
complement our existing Rittenhouse ‘blue-chip’ growth product,
enabling us to offer growth investment solutions across a broader
capitalization range.
Sum of parts
Back on 1 August 2005, Nuveen Investments said it would pay $50
million in cash for Santa Barbara, with an additional “long-term
equity opportunity” for the firm’s “key professionals.” Santa
Barbara, which manages about $3 billion in institutional and
high-net-worth assets, will operate independently in terms of its
research and investment operations.
Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Santa Barbara has been around since
1988. Its assets under management have doubled in the past two
years, according to Nuveen Investments. Best known for its
stable-growth style, Santa Barbara introduced a small- to mid-cap
opportunistic-growth portfolio in 2004, and a
high-dividend-growth strategy earlier this year.
It isn’t clear whether Santa Barbara’s fit with Rittenhouse’s
approach growth equity means it will become, administratively at
least, a part of Rittenhouse. As it stands Nuveen Investments is
made up of four parts: Rittenhouse, value manager NWQ,
alternatives manager Symphony and Nuveen Asset Management, a
municipal bond manager.
Nuveen Investments is a big name in the retail separately managed
account (SMA) space. It’s common to see two or three of its
subsidiaries ranked among the top 10 third-party separate account
providers in Cerulli Associates’ quarterly report on the SMA
industry. Altogether, Nuveen Investments’ subsidiaries manage
$127 billion in assets. –FWR
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