Three Candidates in the Race to Acquire UniCredit’s Pioneer Asset Management Branch

In the race to acquire the branch of the Italian bank UniCredit for asset management Pioneer, with a potential value of three billion euros, three main potential buyers have crystallized, unnamed sources told Reuters. The offers were submitted in order by the Italian insurer Assicurazioni Generali, the largest asset manager in Italy, the French group Amundi, the largest asset manager in Europe, and an Italian consortium led by the state postal company Poste Italiane, the unnamed sources stated to Reuters on Tuesday.

Poste Italiane has joined forces with the state development bank Cassa Depositi e Prestiti and the asset manager Anima, in which they hold a 10.32 percent stake. The state postal company aims to offer new investment products to Italian savers through more than 13,000 post offices across the country, Reuters explains.

Amundi manages assets worth over 1,000 billion dollars. It was formed in 2010 through the merger of the respective branches of the French banks Credit Agricole and Societe Generale. Currently, their market capitalization stands at 7.5 billion euros, and their shares were listed on the Euronext Paris exchange in November last year.

These three offers are considered the most prominent, sources tell Reuters, highlighting among other potential buyers the French companies Axa and Natixis, the Australian Macquarie, the German Allianz, and the British group Aberdeen Asset Management. In UniCredit, Generali, Amundi, Poste Italiane, and Macquarie declined to comment on this information, while officials from the other companies were not immediately available for comment.

A successful sale is crucial for UniCredit, which is troubled by a capital shortfall estimated at as much as eight billion euros. The bank aims to reach an agreement on the sale of Pioneer by November, although the deadline for non-binding offers expired this Monday, the sources add. The sale is being led by American banks JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley, and the process is expected to gain momentum in the coming weeks as UniCredit has allowed access to Pioneer’s books ahead of the deadline for submitting binding offers at the end of October, the sources said.

The Italian bank aims to raise three billion euros through this transaction. Pioneer manages assets with a total value exceeding 220 billion euros.