Asset manager nabs stable-growth play to complement Rittenhouse offerings. Nuveen Investments has acquired growth-stock portfolio manager Santa Barbara Asset Management. Chicago-based Nuveen Investments says that Santa Barbara’s stable-growth strategy – a top-quartile performer against peers for the past one-, three-, five- and ten-year periods – makes nice fit with the growth plays of its Rittenhouse subsidiary.

“The addition of Santa Barbara reinforces our commitment to provide investors and the financial advisors who serve them with access to a range of high-quality investment specialists,” says Nuveen Investments' CEO Tim Schwertfeger. “Santa Barbara's investment solutions will expand our growth product line-up and complement our existing Rittenhouse ‘blue-chip’ growth product, enabling us to offer growth investment solutions across a broader capitalization range.

Sum of parts

Back on 1 August 2005, Nuveen Investments said it would pay $50 million in cash for Santa Barbara, with an additional “long-term equity opportunity” for the firm’s “key professionals.” Santa Barbara, which manages about $3 billion in institutional and high-net-worth assets, will operate independently in terms of its research and investment operations.

Santa Barbara, Calif.-based Santa Barbara has been around since 1988. Its assets under management have doubled in the past two years, according to Nuveen Investments. Best known for its stable-growth style, Santa Barbara introduced a small- to mid-cap opportunistic-growth portfolio in 2004, and a high-dividend-growth strategy earlier this year.

It isn’t clear whether Santa Barbara’s fit with Rittenhouse’s approach growth equity means it will become, administratively at least, a part of Rittenhouse. As it stands Nuveen Investments is made up of four parts: Rittenhouse, value manager NWQ, alternatives manager Symphony and Nuveen Asset Management, a municipal bond manager.

Nuveen Investments is a big name in the retail separately managed account (SMA) space. It’s common to see two or three of its subsidiaries ranked among the top 10 third-party separate account providers in Cerulli Associates’ quarterly report on the SMA industry. Altogether, Nuveen Investments’ subsidiaries manage $127 billion in assets. –FWR

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