A possible $5.5-trillion-AUM mega-merger is in the news again.

Martin L. "Marty" Flanagan Invesco President and CEO

Marty Flanagan and his Invesco [profile] team are in talks to combine the Atlanta-based, publicly traded asset manager with Boston-based, publicly traded State Street's asset management arm (SSGA, i.e. State Street Global Advisors [profile]), the Wall Street Journal reported last night. Yet "a deal isn't imminent," according to unnamed sources, the paper added.

The WSJ article comes less than a year after reports that State Street had hired Goldman Sachs to weigh strategic options for SSGA. At the time, one published report pointed to Invesco as one of several SSGA merger targets under consideration.

SSGA has $3.9 trillion in AUM, while Invesco has $1.5627 trillion in AUM (as of August 31). SSGA is predominantly an institutional asset manager, while Invesco has a sizable retail mutual fund business. Yet both firms are big ETF players. As of September 8, according to ETF.com's ETF League Table, SSGA was the third biggest U.S. ETF manager with $1.0284516 trillion in ETF, while Invesco was fourth with $377.15156 billion: combined, they would have $1.40560316 trillion, behind only BlackRock's iShares and Vanguard.

Invesco deal talk has spiked in the press since a high-profile activist investor took a 9.9-percent stake in the firm last fall. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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