Hellman & Friedman and GIC have emerged as the winners in the auction process for global funds platform Allfunds, agreeing to buy the Spanish business at a €1.8 billion valuation from Intesa Sanpaolo, Santander Group, General Atlantic and Warburg Pincus. Allfunds boasts more than €265 billion in assets under administration and offers access to more than 50,000 funds from around the world.
The somewhat delicate nature of Allfunds’ financial operations may have played a role in the selection of Hellman & Friedman and GIC as buyers. Chinese investor group Legend is believed to have entered a similar offer, but Santander, a Spanish bank, was apprehensive about selling Allfunds to a buyer from the world’s most populous country, according to the Financial Times.
Earlier reports on the auction process indicated a whole host of potential acquirers, including Bain Capital, Advent International, Permira and plenty of others, according to Reuters. General Atlantic, another one of the sellers, has been among the busiest private equity firms in the capital markets & institutions sector since the start of 2007—a list you can examine in full right here.
For Hellman & Friedman, meanwhile, the acquisition continues an acceleration in investment activity during the past three-plus years. Between 2006 and 2013, the firm never completed more than 24 deals in any one year, according to the PitchBook Platform. In 2014, though, that figure jumped to 44, followed by 63 investments in 2015 and 44 more last year. There are likely multiple reasons for the uptick, but surely one of them was the 2014 close of Hellman & Friedman’s latest flagship buyout fund on $10.9 billion.
And as far as targets go, the investment in Allfunds is hardly a surprise. Nearly 34% of all Hellman & Friedman investments since the start of 2006 have been in the financial services space, by far the most among all industries. Here’s a fuller look at Hellman & Friedman’s activity sorted by sector, taken straight from the Platform:
Allfunds
PitchBook subscribers can learn plenty more about the firm’s deal history, closed funds, management team and more right here.
Article by Kevin Dowd, PitchBook
