A big broker-dealer's asset management arm is consolidating all of its mutual fund back-office support with a single vendor.

Susan Walzer, vice president of fund administration at Eagle Asset Management [profile], confirms that effective today the Raymond James unit now uses various arms of U.S. Bank as the Eagle Mutual Funds' accountant, custodian, sub-administrator, and transfer agent. Eagle had been working with J.P. Morgan.

A spokeswoman for J.P. Morgan declined to comment for this story.

Walzer, who is also principal executive officer for the Eagle funds, explains that working with a single back-office vendor as being primarily about efficiency.

"When there's a question, you have one place to go," Walzer tells MFWire. "We just thought US Bank would be a great partner in our future growth."

The way Walzer tells it, the switch to US Bank has been years in the making. Once upon a time, the folks at Eagle handled back-office work internally. In 2010, Eagle outsourced that work to J.P. Morgan Worldwide Securities Services (now called J.P. Morgan Investor Services, which is part of the corporate and investment bank). Yet that relationship changed shortly thereafter.

"J.P. Morgan made a business decision not to be in the transfer agency business," Walzer says, so they sub-outsourced to US Bank.

So Eagle and US Bank have already been working together on transfer agency for about five years. Two years ago Eagle started an RFP to consolidate its back-office vendor relationships. After considering several providers, Walzer says, they settled on US Bank.

"We've had an excellent experience with US Bank," Walzer says. 

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