By Dhirendra Tripathi
Investing.com – Invesco stock (NYSE:IVZ) surged more than 5% in Friday’s premarket trading on a report in The Wall Street Journal that it is in talks to merge with State Street’s asset management business.
State Street (NYSE:STT) stock traded 0.5% higher. A deal isn’t imminent and the outcome could go either way, the WSJ said.
As of the end of June, State Street’s asset-management unit managed $3.9 trillion in assets. Invesco oversees $1.5 trillion in assets with a large ETF business.
State Steet has a market cap of around $32 billion while Invesco’s is a little over a third of that at $11.48 billion.
The march of mainly passive ETF-based investing has cramped the space for discretionary fund managers, pressuring them to consolidate to survive.
Invesco snapped up Guggenheim Partners’ ETF business in 2018 and Oppenheimer Fund a year later. Earlier this month, State Street bought Brown Brothers Harriman’s investor services business for $3.5 billion in cash.