Blake Moore is preparing to make Touchstone Investments' [profile] first acquisition in four years. He's open to doing more deals.

The Cincinnati-based mutual fund firm's planned acquisition of AIG's retail mutual fund business, as reported last month, covers about $7.5 billion across 12 funds. The upshot is that Touchstone (part of Western & Southern Financial Group) will gain "a significant increase in ... platform assets," says Moore, who took over last year as CEO of Touchstone; Touchstone expects to gain two new mutual funds, and more assets in seven existing funds.

"They're a really good match for our Touchstone platform," Moore tells MFWire.

Moore expects the deal to close around July. As for future M&A, Moore says that the Touchstone team is "careful about these acquisitions." He says liftouts and adoptions with ongoing subadvisory relationships are possibilities, too, in addition to fund merger and asset deals like with AIG.

"We have to believe that it's going to be a really good deal for the [fund] shareholders that are involved, and it has to be a good business decision," Moore says. "We're not out there looking to do deals just to do deals."

"We have a strong, scalable platform and mutual fund business. Our goal is to continue to growth that," Moore adds. "We will look to do that both organically and inorganically, when the opportunities arise."

The AIG deal is expected to boost Touchstone to more than $30 billion in AUM across 33 funds.

"Touchstone's coming off really our best year ever in 2020 from a sales and growth standpoint," Moore says. "We're really excited about where we are. We love our fund lineup." 

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