Wealth and asset management firm AlTi Global acquired Singapore-based wealth manager AL Wealth Partners, as it eyes the growing wealth and endowment space in the city-state and plans to use it as a launchpad into Southeast Asia.
AlTi has $65 billion in assets under management, of which wealth clients make up $45 billion, and institutional investors — such as foundations and endowments — make up the remaining $20 billion. The deal price was not revealed.
"We have a corporate advisory and merchant banking operation as well… Historically, there has been very little if any cross pollination between our asset management division and our wealth division," said Robert Weeber, AlTi's president of international wealth management, in an interview. "That's important because for wealth management clients, our independence is key that we do not offer in-house products. But also for another reason in that all of our asset management transactions across business lines have their own institutional client base," he said.
AL Wealth Partners brings $1.5 billion to the table, which Antonia Hui, founder and CEO, admitted is "a small number compared to the AlTi group… (But) we are not comparing here, we are complementing. We are hoping to add value to the group through accessibility and connectivity," she said in an interview.
AL Wealth Partners also manages assets for the foundations and endowments set up by their clients, she said. "We help clients by bringing the awareness or consciousness about why they would need to have another zero added to their multi zeros (through endowments)," said Ms. Hui, who was made AlTi's Singapore head of international wealth management after the merger.
AlTi is itself a product of a merger between U.S.-based multifamily office Tiedemann Group, London-headquartered wealth and asset management firm Alvarium Investments, and special purpose acquisition company Cartesian Growth Corporation. The January merger created Alvarium Tiedemann Holdings, which trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol ALTI.
The firm, which already has a Hong Kong office, chose Singapore as its second Asia office to attract Asian entrepreneurs and to use it as a launchpad into Southeast Asia.
"The question was not sort of, why aren't you in Singapore? The dynamism of the market, the entrepreneurship that the government has fostered over the past decades, rather than years, is producing a cohort of entrepreneurs, liquidity events and a flywheel of growth in the market that we were very, very keen to be, to be part of," Mr. Weeber said.
"We also think of it as a as a launchpad into the rest of Southeast Asia as well. Which isn't a new strategy, but we are obviously surrounded by very, very exciting markets such as Indonesia and Malaysia," he said.
He added that Southeast Asia also offers interesting capital deployment opportunities and the team is always on the lookout to work with new managers. "If you look at Vietnam, for example, it's a clearly volatile but growing market. More and more solutions are popping up to capture exposure to that market. So we are selectively looking at that," Mr. Weeber said.
