Nelson Peltz’s bidding war highlights $25bn wave of asset manager consolidation

When Nelson Peltz’s Trian made a $7.4bn takeover bid for Janus Henderson late last year, few in the market expected Victory Capital to swoop in and try to hijack the deal.

After weeks of wrangling, an improved all-cash $8bn bid from Trian and investors led by venture firm General Catalyst beat the Texas-based investment group’s $8.6bn cash-and-share offer.

The intense bidding war, however, was the clearest sign yet of a wave of consolidation sweeping the asset management industry, as fund houses rush to scale up globally and private equity firms pick off transatlantic businesses with growth potential.

Despite the volatile market environment, there have been nearly $25bn worth of global money manager mergers and acquisitions in the first three months of the year — more than half of the total for all of 2025, according to data from Dealogic.

Just weeks before the fight over Janus kicked off, US-based Nuveen, owned by a mutual financial services firm, made a £9.9bn bid for London-based Schroders.

People close to the transaction pointed to the need for scale — achieved by creating a $2tn asset manager — and for building a presence across the US, Europe and Asia.

Mounting costs and competition from cheap index-tracking funds are turning the screws on traditional investment houses beyond the industry’s multi-trillion-dollar heavyweights, just as active managers must also navigate rising market volatility.

“The whole industry is seeing pretty consistent fee pressure from all these factors: mutual fund to exchange traded funds, active to passive,” said Ben Budish, equity research analyst at Barclays.

“The punchline is: scale matters, especially in an industry where growth is hard.”

Advisers believe these pressures will pave the way for even more mergers and acquisitions, as bigger firms seek opportunities in new geographies and private markets, while smaller businesses combine forces to avoid dying a slow death.

“We are definitely expecting there to be a lot more consolidation in the industry,” said one corporate lawyer at a US firm, referring to traditional and alternative asset managers. “We have a bunch of things in the pipeline,” he added, “probably more than we’ve had in the past few years”.

Industry participants have anticipated a period of intense consolidation for years, but accelerating activity suggests this might finally be coming to fruition.

The trend is most pronounced in Europe, where 61 asset managers have been snapped up or merged this year already, totalling $19bn — compared with $14.3bn for the whole of 2025, according to Dealogic.

In the US, the number of deals agreed over the past three months has already reached almost a third of last year’s total deal count, although the value of deals is lower.

More fund groups are making strategic acquisitions to pile into private markets products, which typically command higher fees than public equities and fixed income. In recent years, BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, has scooped up private credit titan HPS for $12bn and infrastructure investment firm Global Infrastructure Partners for $12.5bn.

But this convergence of public and private markets has applied even more pressure to smaller stocks-and-bonds firms to combine with other players — or risk falling by the wayside.

“The thing with larger firms is that people can do one-stop-shopping there,” said the lawyer.

“A lot of money has flowed into the larger asset managers, who just have scale; they can take swings at things . . . if they don’t work out, it doesn’t matter. They can do complete bolt-ons, like buying private credit, buying insurance assets.”

He added that midsized asset managers with assets under management of roughly $50bn “are going to clump together”, saying they faced a choice to “sell before it’s too late or buy so they’re not standing still”.

One banker noted that US managers with more firepower remained eager to pounce, adding that the likes of serial acquirer Franklin Templeton, T Rowe Price, PGIM and MetLife “still have global ambitions.”

In a signal of further dealmaking to come, Victory Capital is aiming to snap up other peers despite backing down over Janus.

The company said that it “will continue to pursue transactions that increase the competitiveness of the company through size, scale, product expansion and distribution access throughout the world.”

Firms in Europe are also racing to bulk up. Some are pursuing bolt-on acquisitions, such as London-based Jupiter’s deal last year to buy smaller rival CCLA.

But the banker noted that BNP Paribas’ acquisition of Axa Investment Managers last year for €5.1bn sparked a flurry of calls from asset managers looking to do larger deals.

Advisers believe more American managers will look beyond US borders in a bid to shore up their capital as geopolitics puts dollar assets under pressure.

A second US lawyer noted that “the US and the UK are very significant global markets that speak the same language and have similar regulation and capital markets, so I do think that is a type of combination that’s going to continue”.

The trend towards alternative assets and private capital is likely to gather pace, as fund managers hunt for bigger profit margins and major public equity markets continue to shrink.

“I would say that the alternatives have the advantage of having larger margins, greater profits per dollar under management,” the second lawyer said.

“That would give the alternatives managers, I think, a meaningful advantage in the world of fuelling further growth and acquiring new businesses.”