Acadian Announces Systematic Credit Initiative

By: BrightSphere Investment Group Inc. via Business Wire

July 13, 2022 at 09:02 AM EDT

Firm brings on pioneer in the space to launch new capability

BrightSphere Investment Group Inc. (NYSE: BSIG) today announced that its sole operating business, Acadian Asset Management, plans to introduce a systematic credit capability and has hired Scott Richardson, a pioneer in the space, as Director of Systematic Credit to lead this effort.

Said BrightSphere Chief Executive Officer, Suren Rana, “This initiative is an excellent example of Acadian leveraging its broad and deep quant capabilities to be responsive to the growing demand from clients for excess returns uncorrelated with equities. We look forward to fully supporting the Acadian team in developing and growing world-class and differentiated systematic credit investing capabilities to win a share of the large credit market with $24T in AUM.”

Mr. Richardson will build out and lead a team of portfolio managers, researchers, traders, and support personnel focused on this new initiative, with plans to seed the first strategies in 2023. This work will initially focus on corporate credit-based strategies including high yield corporate, investment grade corporate, and credit long-short. Said Acadian Chief Investment Officer Brendan Bradley, “We believe these fixed income strategies most closely resemble the equity strategies we manage today and will benefit from our existing expertise in data analysis, signal construction, and trading.”

He added, “Scott has had a stellar professional and academic career focused on systematic investing. We have long been familiar with his published research, and we are thrilled to have him on the team contributing directly to our work.”

Mr. Richardson has over 15 years of experience in leading both systematic equity and credit investing at BGI/BlackRock and AQR. He has over 25 years of experience in academia at various top-tier institutions, most recently at the London Business School.

Acadian cited changing bond market dynamics (including increases in electronic bond trading and data availability), alignment with their core capabilities, and investor demand as the primary drivers behind their strategy to enter systematic credit. Said Acadian Chief Executive Officer Ross Dowd, “We believe incremental investment in our research and resources towards credit will provide differentiated fixed income strategies for our clients. We continue to see investor demand for systematic strategies offering consistent returns paired with clarity around return drivers.”

Mr. Richardson previously worked as a researcher and portfolio manager at AQR, with a focus on credit and fixed income markets, and has held senior positions at BlackRock (Barclays Global Investors), including head of Europe Equity Research and Head of Global Credit Research. He is also a Professor at London Business School, where he teaches M.B.A. and Ph.D. classes. Scott began his career as an Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He is an editor of the Review of Accounting Studies and has published extensively in leading academic and practitioner journals. In 2009, he won the Notable Contribution to Accounting award for his work on earnings quality and accruals. Scott earned a B.Ec. with first-class honors from the University of Sydney and a Ph.D. in Business Administration from the University of Michigan.

About BrightSphere

BrightSphere is a global asset management holding company with one operating subsidiary, Acadian Asset Management, with approximately $110 billion of assets under management as of March 31, 2022. Through Acadian, BrightSphere offers institutional investors across the globe access to a wide array of leading quantitative and solutions-based strategies designed to meet a range of risk and return objectives. For more information, please visit BrightSphere’s website at www.bsig.com. Information that may be important to investors will be routinely posted on our website.