The money management unit of State Street Boston Corp. is counting on big dividends from a raid on a European rival.
The unit, State Street Global Advisors, has hired a new managing director and four staffers for its London office, all from the London office of PanAgora Asset Management Inc.
PanAgora, a joint venture of Tokyo's Nippon Life and New York's Lehman Brothers, is based in Boston, as is State Street. It manages $15.2 billion of institutional assets, much less than the $158 billion of assets that Global Advisors manages.
But the two firms' London offices are fierce rivals, with each focusing on quantitative approaches to investing for U.K. pension plans.
State Street's London office manages approximately $3 billion of assets, and PanAgora's London office about $3.5 billion.
Nicholas A. Lopardo, chairman of Global Advisors, said in a press statement that he would be "greatly disappointed if (the London office isn't) managing at least $6 billion of assets sometime in 1996."
Timothy B. Harbert, chief operating officer of Global Advisors, said that much of the growth will come from the new hires providing investment expertise that the London office lacks.
The most senior of the recruits is Alan Brown, formerly chief investment officer in London for PanAgora. Mr. Brown will report to Global Advisors' chief investment officer Peter M. Stonberg in Boston.
The other hires are Paul Duncombe, Malcolm Leigh, and Lucinda Record, each of whom is an investment specialist in currency and fixed-income instruments, and Heather Benson, who will be director of sales and marketing. All five newcomers are expected to assume their posts at mid- month.
This not the only senior staff defection from PanAgora. The firm lost its London-based president, John Snow, early last year when he took a job with Natwest Investment Management.
But Robert E. Casey, PanAgora's marketing director in Boston, said the departures haven't hurt the firm. He said last year was one of PanAgora's "best sales years ever." He added that the quantitative investing models that are PanAgora's speciality can be run by other staffers.
James H. McKenzie, a consulting director of the Spectrem Group in Los Angeles, said State Street's raid was yet another example of how banks are aggressively pursuing the investment management business.n
