PARIS (Agefi-Dow Jones)–Italy for Amundi is not limited to its distribution agreement with the financial group UniCredit. Over the past three years, the staff of the Crédit Agricole management company has often reminded analysts who follow the stock. Signed in 2017 as part of the takeover of Pioneer Investments, at the time asset manager of a UniCredit experiencing major difficulties and looking for ways to consolidate its solvency, this distribution agreement applies to the networks of UniCredit individual customers in Italy, Germany and Austria. It runs until July 2027.
Rumors of the desire of UniCredit, Amundi’s first partner in Italy, to renegotiate the agreement well before its expiry date have regularly returned to the news. However, this is not a rumor but a concrete maneuver by the transalpine financial group which has put its ten-year partnership with Amundi back in the light. This Monday, November 25, UniCredit put more than 10 billion euros on the table to buy the Milanese bank Banco BPM, which itself made, on November 7, 2024, a public purchase offer for the Italian management company independent listed Anima, which has been repeatedly associated with the prospect of an acquisition by Amundi in the past.
UniCredit’s offensive on Banco BPM, criticized by the latter on Tuesday because of the price offered, raises questions from investors about Amundi’s activity with retail customers in Italy. To the point of causing Amundi shares to drop by 10.3% in two sessions, on November 25 and 26, to 60.15 euros, its lowest point since mid-March 2024. This Wednesday, the stock fell another 0.3% to 59.95 euros around 11:20 a.m. UniCredit’s OPE also pushed two analysts, JPMorgan and BNP Paribas Exane, to downgrade Amundi from “outperform” to “neutral”.
+Anticipated negative effects on Amundi’s results+
For Angeliki Bairaktari, head of diversified financial equity research at JPMorgan, UniCredit’s offer creates uncertainty over the future of the distribution agreement with Amundi. According to the American bank, UniCredit accounts for around 20% of the results expected in 2027 by the Crédit Agricole subsidiary. If the JPMorgan analyst considers the end of the relationship between UniCredit and Amundi after 2027 “unlikely”, the OPE, currently uncertain, would increase the probability.
JPMorgan suggests that Amundi will be required to offer higher fee retrocessions to the Italian financial group when the current agreement is renegotiated. The bank also warns of a risk of deeper outflows, a threat which, combined with larger retrocessions, could have a negative effect of 12% on Amundi’s results expected in 2027.
Unlike JPMorgan, BNP Paribas Exane considers the termination of the distribution agreement between UniCredit and Amundi more likely following the Italian group’s move. Analyst Arnaud Giblat perceives that a merger between UniCredit and Banco BPM, if it were to materialize, could lead to the internalization of certain activities such as asset management.
On the subject of the future of UniCredit’s relationship with Amundi, the general director of the Italian group, Andrea Orcel, affirmed, Monday, November 26, that this relationship was “solid”. A statement taken up by the Crédit Agricole management company, requested by L’Agefi. Amundi assures that it is confident in its ability to “continue to effectively support all of our distributors and partners in savings products” through all of its solutions and services. The agreement, as currently formulated, should not a priori be renegotiated before its expiration and UniCredit apparently has no intention of denouncing it.
The Italian market is to date the second most important for the Crédit Agricole asset manager, which managed 202 billion euros there at the end of September 2024. Amundi is going through a difficult time there, with a net outflow of 4.3 billion euros. euros in 2023 which continues in 2024, with 13.8 billion euros in net outflows over the first nine months. This last figure must nevertheless be put into perspective since the asset manager suffered the loss of a multi-asset management mandate from an Italian insurer worth 11.6 billion euros in the third quarter of 2024.
During the presentation of the results for the last quarter of 2023, Valérie Baudson, general director of Amundi, warned of the difficulties ahead in 2024, among other things due to competition from the issuance of a new Italian sovereign bond, an investment still popular with local individuals. More recently, during the presentation of the results for the third quarter of 2024, Nicolas Calcoen retorted to analysts that the outflows recorded in Italy were “not specific to the networks of its partners”, including UniCredit, and that the outflow did not only affect ‘Amundi.
The Deputy Managing Director of Amundi had also affirmed that a possible takeover of Commerzbank – which revived an asset management activity in the summer of 2023 with the creation of YellowFin Asset Management – by UniCredit, current at the time of the exchange with analysts would have no impact on the distribution contract. He suggested that it had been shaped to be protected and that there was no automatic expansion to new networks acquired by UniCredit. Which implies that it would not apply to Anima if by chance the double operation UniCredit/BPM and BPM/Anima were to succeed.
+Major agreements to be renegotiated+
UniCredit is trying to rebuild an asset management business, seven years after the sale of Pioneer to Amundi. At the end of 2022, the Italian group entrusted Azimut with the creation of a management company domiciled in Ireland, Nova Investment Management, in which it can acquire a majority stake or even more by 2027. The joint venture, which creates investment distributed on the UniCredit networks in Italy on a non-exclusive basis, is currently fully owned by Azimut and represents some 20 billion euros in outstandings.
In the fall of 2023, Nicolas Calcoen recalled, in an interview with analysts, that UniCredit was “totally free to organize itself as it wishes for the part which does not appear in our distribution agreement, because yet another However, this agreement is not exclusive”. “There is room for an open architecture or an internal architecture and UniCredit is completely free to organize it,” he said.
The agreement with UniCredit is not the only one in the spotlight. A similar distribution partnership with Banco Sabadell, concluded during the acquisition of Sabadell Asset Management by Amundi in 2020 and running until 2030, is attracting the attention of analysts, especially if BBVA’s takeover bid for Sabadell comes to an end. In May 2024, the Spanish economic media El Confidencial predicted that it would cost BBVA 350 million euros to break this agreement. An amount that Amundi did not comment on at the time.
While waiting for more clarity on current operations in Italy and Spain, Amundi will have to renegotiate another major distributor agreement which ends in November 2025. Namely that with Société Générale, initiated in 2009 and which was renewed in 2015 then in 2020. According to JPMorgan, this agreement accounts for around 8% of Amundi’s results. “Agreements with other banks have a limited lifespan. We believe that investor perception has evolved in recent years towards a greater risk of disruption when these agreements have to be renegotiated,” underlines Angeliki Bairaktari.
-Adrien Paredes-Vanheule, L’Agefi ; ed: JDO
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