The fates of Pioneer Investments [profile] and the U.S. arm led by Lisa Jones will soon be less intertwined.

Martin Arnold of the Financial Times reports that Pioneer's U.S. arm will become a separate unit, jointly backed by Pioneer parent UniCredit and a pair of private equity firms, Warburg Pincus (backer of ETF firm Source) and General Atlantic.

In September, UniCredit CEO Federico Ghizzoni confirmed that his giant Italian bank was in exclusive talks with a giant Spanish bank, Banco Santander, to combine their asset management units into a joint venture. General Atlantic and Warburg Pincus came into the deal thanks to recently buying a 50-percent share in Santander Asset Management. At the time, the deal would reportedly have split a third of the joint-venture into the hands of the PE firms, with the remaining two-thirds divided evenly between the two banks.

Yet the FT now reports that Ana Botin, Santander's executive chairman, has changed the deal so that the U.S. arm of Pioneer will be spun off the Santander-UniCredit asset management joint venture as a separate unit -- owned by UniCredit, Warburg, and General Atlantic, but not Santander. The idea, the FT says, is to avoid further antagonizing U.S. regulators, after Santander failed a stress test twice in a row. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


Stay ahead of the news ... Sign up for our email alerts now
CLICK HERE