Nuveen completes nearly $13.1 billion acquisition of Schroders

Huffman plans ‘evolutionary’ integration over 12 to 18 months

Nuveen, the Chicago-headquartered investment manager and TIAA subsidiary, has closed its acquisition of the British asset manager Schroders in a deal valued at nearly $13.1 billion, lifting Nuveen’s assets under management to $2.6 trillion and placing the combined firm among the world’s ten largest asset managers.

The transaction ends Schroders’ 222-year run as an independent company and removes it from the FTSE 100 index. In British press, Schroders often appears next to words like “venerable” or “storied”; the 222-year-old institution now carries a new descriptor: American-owned.

The deal, announced earlier in 2026 and described by the Wall Street Journal as typical of recent industry consolidation and other trends, transfers ownership of one of the United Kingdom’s oldest financial institutions to a U.S. parent.

In an interview at the WSJ Leadership Institute’s offices last month, Nuveen CEO Bill Huffman said he did not view the acquisition as necessary per se. Nuveen had already grown from $50 billion in assets under management in 2008 to roughly $1.5 trillion this year, when the Schroders plan was announced, Huffman said. The purchase, he said, “greatly expands both brands’ global reach.”

Huffman has overseen more than 10 mergers over the past several years and describes his method of melding acquired entities as an “evolutionary process.” Under the terms of the agreement, Schroders will operate as a separate company within Nuveen for 12 to 18 months.

“We’ll figure out really at that point [how] Schroders and Nuveen come together as this new thing,” Huffman said.

Huffman addressed the significance of acquiring a British institution with more than two centuries of history. “We’ll never lose the legacy of what Schroders has meant to the business world, to the family, what they’ve meant to the UK and their clients around the world,” Huffman told WSJ CEO Brief editor Lila MacLellan.

In a separate item, the same WSJ newsletter reported a decline in Nike’s share price so far this year. On an earnings call yesterday, Nike said it was planning to shrink operations and cut jobs, and that decisions about impacted roles would begin in 2027. “We do not yet know the number of roles or specific locations of positions,” CEO Elliott Hill said.