The asset-management industry has been steadily consolidating for a decade—but Nelson Peltz thinks it isn’t happening fast enough. His company, Trian Fund Management, just took a 9.9% stake each in Invesco and Janus Henderson, with an eye to creating an asset-management giant.
Peltz is no stranger to asset management. In 2009, he took a stake in Legg Mason, eventually ousted the CEO, and pushed it to make several acquisitions and shut down some of its smaller businesses. Trian’s second investment in Legg, and his second stint on the board, was in 2019. In 2020, Franklin Resources bought Legg, giving Peltz a 55% return on his investment. Trian’s “business model is different from other shareholders,” says Glenn Schorr of Evercore ISI, “but they know the space very well.
Yet growth has been hard to come by. “Invesco is basically using what cost synergies are being generated from the OppenheimerFunds deal to shore up its operating profitability in the face of a more volatile market environment, where fees and margins were already under pressure,” Morningstar analyst Greggory Warren wrote after Invesco’s second-quarter results.