Montag & Caldwell, a $14 billion-in-assets investment manager based in Buckhead, is about to be locally-owned once again.
The 28 partners of the firm, whose clients include the State of Georgia Employees Retirement System, should close by the end of this month on a deal to buy the company founded in Atlanta in 1945.
“We’ve been through four changes of control in just the last three years,” said Ron Canakaris, the company’s chairman and chief investment officer. “This will be the fifth.”
Despite a roiling economy and the company’s wandering through a virtual foster system of corporate parentage, its top officers say the firm has performed well.
But the partners decided the investment manager to large institutional clients needed its independence.
Montag & Caldwell is currently 75 percent owned by the Paris-based banking conglomerate BNP Paribus, and 25 percent is held by the Belgian government.
The firm was bought by ABN AMRO in 2001. A consortium of Royal Bank of Scotland Group, Fortis and Spain’s Banco Santander tried to buy ABN AMRO in 2007, and Montag & Caldwell was claimed by Fortis when that deal collapsed because of the financial crisis. During a subsequent selling off of certain Fortis assets, Montag & Caldwell came to be owned by the Belgian government, and later BNP Paribus.
“We’re in the business of selling confidence. No one can predict the future,” said Bill Vogel, the firm’s president and CEO. But selling your services while having to simultaneously explain a complicated ownership structure makes things difficult.
The deal, the terms of which the company declined to disclose, will finally give Montag & Caldwell “a stable ownership structure” to match a leadership team that has remained virtually intact for two decades, said Canakaris, who joined the company in 1972.
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