Family Office
Turner Investment Partners hands off SMA ops to SEI
Asset manager chooses outsourcing provider for managed account processing. Berwyn, Pa.-based Turner Investment Partners has selected SEI to provide administrative, reconciliation and reporting services for its separately managed account (SMA) business.
SEI has been Turner's mutual-fund processor for the better part of a decade, and Oaks, Pa.-based SEI -- which provide operations outsourcing to hedge-fund and private-equity-fund managers as well as SMA and mutual-fund managers -- likes to emphasize its all-product investment processing capabilities.
Too many
"As our clients look to partner with one provider to streamline all their operations, we are in a position to offer our expertise, as well as deliver an integrated approach to servicing a client's entire business," says John Alshefski, head of business development for SEI's Investment Manager Services (IMS) division. "[Although] we won Turner's [SMA] business because of our depth of knowledge, our process and technology, we also believe that it's a testament to the partnership approach we take with our clients and the value we bring to each relationship."
The retail SMA business accounts for more than $800 billion in assets under management and it's expected to pass the $1-trillion mark before 2010. But industry observers say there's only room for two or three outsourced operations providers to the space.
Though SMA business-service deals go back to the mid 1990s, deal flow picked up considerably between the spring of 2005 and the fall of 2006. Since then things seemed to have stalled a bit, but that flurry saw SEI and Citigroup pull ahead of rivals like Bank of New York Mellon, State Street, JPMorganChase and PFPC.
In fact the field has already narrowed. SMA processor BISYS became part of Citigroup last year. The Bank of New York bowed out about eight months before its 2007 merger with Mellon, a pioneer of SMA operations outsourcing.
Turner Investment Partners manages about $27.6 billion in assets, according to its latest ADV filing with the SEC. -FWR
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