BlackRock Investment Management (BlackRock) Australia managing director Maurice O’Shannassy said it will be business as usual for both BlackRock’s and Barclays Global Investors’ (BGI) local businesses in the short term.
O’Shannassy agreed that some products both BlackRock and BGI Australia offered had some similarities, including Australian and international shares.
“There are a couple of areas where there are similar types of funds … and we’ll be making announcements in the future as to how exactly the structure will work. So there’s nothing we can say at this point,” he said.
However, in the global context of BlackRock and BGI’s deal there are not many areas where products overlap, O’Shannassy said.
“It is similar to the Merrill Lynch/BlackRock deal a few years back. Where there are overlaps we will be looking at it pretty quickly and letting everyone know how that’s going to work going forward,” he said.
BlackRock and BGI’s combination would create a firm that has unparalleled capability to bring a “very exciting” suite of products and solutions to clients across the whole spectrum of investment, he added.
BlackRock Australia traces its history back to the 1980s. It was first known in 1983 as Potter Partners Asset Management and in 1987 as Potter Warburg Asset Management. In the mid-1990s the firm became Mercury Asset Management and eventually became a part of the investment arm of securities firm Merrill Lynch.
In 2006, Merrill Lynch merged its investment arm with fund manager BlackRock, and the name of what started as Potter Partners Asset Management became BlackRock.
“In many ways this was a local company that became global,” O’Shannassy said.
BlackRock on Friday executed a purchase agreement to acquire BGI, including the iShares exchanged-traded funds unit, in a record US$13.5 billion deal.
