Philadelphia’s FIS Group agreed to acquire Piedmont Investment Advisors LLC, a 21-person firm based in Durham, NC. With the acquisition, FIS will have a combined $10 billion in assets, making it one of the biggest U.S. African American-owned investment companies. Employees from both groups will keep their jobs.

According to The Philly Inquirer, FIS says it manages $5.6 billion in “innovative portfolio solutions across the global public equity spectrum through entrepreneurial managers worldwide,” and Piedmont expects to manage $4.7 billion in “active, passive, and structured beta equity and core fixed-income management.”

Most of the clients that FIS deals with are governments, and the same can be said of Piedmont. The money management industry can be hard to break into, especially for minorities. But many are still pushing to encourage government agencies to be more inclusive by hiring minority and women-owned firms to diversify the field.

The merging of FIS and Piedmont makes for a multi-asset management firm that’s able to sell active and passive equity, fixed income, U.S. and global strategies.

“This union expands our abilities to construct and manage investment strategies and solutions that will be accretive to our collective clients’ specific needs,” says Tina Byles Williams, FIS Group’s CEO and CIO.

Piedmont

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