By Vicky Ge Huang and Miriam Gottfried

Janus Henderson is forging a wide-ranging partnership with Guardian Life, the latest investment firm to carve a larger role managing insurance money.

The agreement includes a mandate to manage $45 billion of the insurer's bond portfolio, executives at the two companies said. Guardian Life also agreed to invest as much as $400 million to seed new initiatives at Janus Henderson, including credit products, and receive warrants that grant it the right to buy stock in the investment manager at a predetermined price.

The move will supercharge Janus Henderson, the byproduct of a 2017 merger between two managers that had struggled along with other stock pickers as investors shifted hundreds of billions of dollars into passive index funds. But under Chief Executive Ali Dibadj, the firm has staged a comeback by building out its offerings in bonds and private-market assets -- and winning more business from insurance companies and other deep-pocketed institutions.

Shares of Janus Henderson slid 0.7% on Tuesday. The stock has slumped more than 30% this year amid a broader selloff of financials.

When the deal closes this year, Janus Henderson's fixed-income assets will total more than $147 billion, or roughly a third of the firm's total assets, and its investments with insurance-company clients will total $109 billion.

Janus Henderson, based in London, managed about $379 billion at year-end.

The two companies said they would create "model portfolios," preset investment templates, for the insurer's investment advisers. Known as Park Avenue Securities, the broker-dealer division has more than 2,400 advisers overseeing about $58.5 billion of client assets.

Insurance companies manage the money they collect in premiums from policyholders. In recent years, they have turned increasingly to Wall Street to invest that money, betting traditional asset managers and private-capital giants alike will generate a higher return on those assets than their in-house teams.

Partnering with outside managers "creates positive value for both firms at a much more rapid rate" than doing it alone, said Andrew McMahon, chairman and CEO of Guardian Life.

McMahon said 13 Guardian Life employees who work in the in-house investment team will be offered jobs at Janus Henderson.

Guardian in August shifted $30 billion of assets to private-credit manager HPS Investment Partners to invest in publicly traded junk bonds, investment-grade private credit and real estate debt and equity. BlackRock agreed to buy HPS for roughly $12 billion at the end of last year.

Guardian Life will receive 1.6 million warrants on Janus Henderson stock, a person familiar with the transaction said. Janus Henderson has a market value of about $4.7 billion.

The deal doesn't change the ownership structure of Janus Henderson, which counts activist investor Trian Fund Management as a major shareholder.

"They are long-term shareholders of Janus Henderson and so partnerships like this with Guardian are exactly the type of thing they are aligned with to try to grow the firm and deliver more for our clients and our partners," Dibadj said in an interview.

Write to Vicky Ge Huang at vicky.huang@wsj.com and Miriam Gottfried at Miriam.Gottfried@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

April 08, 2025 17:12 ET (21:12 GMT)

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