Homegrown financial services firm Avendus Capital has executed an agreement to buy Spark Capital’s institutional equities arm in a bid to expand its offerings by including institutional equities business, the company said in a statement on Monday.
This will add a fifth vertical to Mumbai-based Avendus Capital which currently offers services such as investment banking, wealth management, credit solutions and asset management.
Chennai-based Spark Capital’s institutional equities arm is led by Ganeshram Jayaraman, and he will continue to lead the team post the transaction, Avendus said. The institutional equities arm currently has around 80 employees and it claims to have catered to over 400 clients over the last 15 years.
“With this partnership, we will be significantly enhancing our service offerings to our Investment Banking and Wealth clients,” said Gaurav Deepak, Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Avendus Capital, which is backed by global private equity major KKR & Co.
Avendus said that its clients are accessing public market capital pools to grow and diversify shareholder base. Thus, to make public markers accessible to them, Avendus is making forays into institutional equities business, it said. Avendus also said that it will be significantly investing to build equity capital market capabilities.
Currently, it handles $6.25 billion assets under management (AUM) under its wealth management ($5.5 billion AUM), assets management and credit solutions (excluding loan book) business.
Avendus, founded in Mumbai in 1999, is present in 10 cities across India, the UK, the US and Singapore. Recently, Avendus Group’s asset management arm Avendus PE Investment Advisors had marked the first close of its second structured credit fund Avendus Structured Credit Fund II (ASCF II) by raising Rs 432 crore (around $57.85 million). Avendus PE Investment Advisors had launched the second fund in October last year with $133 million target corpus.
Avendus Group has also roped in Anirban Banerjee, IIFL executive, as its new chief human resources officer.
Over the past five years, it has completed over 50 transactions with a total investment of over Rs 3,000 crore in the structured credit space through the NBFC and the AIF’s first fund. KKR bought a controlling stake in Avendus in 2015, a move that was seen to help the domestic firm scale its services in wealth management and private equity, besides foraying into the NBFC space.
