MutualFundWire.com: OpFunds Lands on the West Coast and Keeps Hunting

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Tuesday, March 7, 2017

OpFunds Lands on the West Coast and Keeps Hunting

Thanks to a pending acquisition, OppenheimerFunds [profile] is poised to add its first West Coast office, and the New York City-based mutual fund shop's leaders are still on the prowl for more deals.

Peter Mintzberg
OppenheimerFunds
Chief Strategy Officer

"Yes, we are continually proactively looking for additional acquisitions, anything that we believe would speed up execution of our strategy," Peter Mintzberg, chief strategy officer at OpFunds, tells MFWire. "It's really about listening to our clients and finding ways of accelerating the organic growth of the firm through acquisitions. We have a very deliberate plan in place to do that."

Today OpFunds chairman and CEO Art Steinmetz unveiled a deal to buy Seattle-based SNW Asset Management. The pricing and terms of the deal were not disclosed, and OpFunds did not use an investment bank for the deal, Mintzberg says. The deal is expected to close in Q2 2017, "towards the end of April."

"The entire deal was done in-house," Mintzberg says.

SNW is a fixed income shop with $2.7 billion in AUM, mostly in separately managed accounts for high net worth investors working with RIAs. The firm has 17 employees and will become one of OpFunds' boutiques.

"They will have no changes in personnel," Mintzberg says.

Like another one of OpFunds' boutiques, Rochester, SNW specializes in municipal bond investing. Yet Rochester focuses on high-yield munis and puts its strategies in mutual funds, while SNW focuses on high-quality munis and offers its strategies in SMAs.

"It comes as a complement to our existing offerings in the muni space," Mintzberg says of SNW, praising the boutique's SMAs as "more customized" and "more adaptable."

"We spent an enormous amount of time with SNW's management to understand how the two companies fit together," Mintzberg adds, noting that the two companies have been "working on a deal for a few months now."

OpFunds has no current plans to put SNW's strategies inside mutual funds.

"We don't discard it but it's not in the plan now," Mintzberg says.

Printed from: MFWire.com/story.asp?s=55847

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