Amundi, the company behind the Amundi ETF product range, has formed a strategic partnership with ‘smart beta’ specialists TOBAM.

Yves Perrier, Managing Director of Amundi.

As part of the partnership, Paris-based Amundi has acquired a 17.5% equity stake in TOBAM. This stake has been purchased from the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), which has reduced its holdings, and TOBAM employees.

The partnership includes a distribution agreement under which Amundi, with its wide-reaching international distribution capabilities, will make TOBAM’s “Anti-Benchmark” strategies available to its clients. These strategies are designed to outperform traditional market-cap-weighted indices with lower risk by providing maximum diversification within an investment universe.

Yves Perrier, Managing Director of Amundi, commented: “This agreement forms part of Amundi’s policy of offering its clients the best expertises. To complement our in-house asset management teams, Amundi offers product ranges that stem from targeted partnerships. By proposing TOBAM’s Anti-Benchmark strategy, Amundi, which currently manages 92 billion euros in equities, is strengthening its range of ‘Next Generation’ investment solutions.”

Amundi’s ‘Next Generation’ strategies comprise minimum variance, maximum diversification, risk parity and options-based asymmetric approaches.

Yves Choueifaty, President of TOBAM declared: “Our agreement with Amundi will improve the accessibility of our products to a broad clientele on a global level, in particular in Europe, Asia and the Middle East, where Amundi’s network and technical expertise are well established.”

Last year, TOBAM teamed up with global index provider FTSE Group to launch of a family of 8 indices based on TOBAM strategies.  The indices, known as the FTSE TOBAM Maximum Diversification Index Series, seek to provide investors with the most diversified portfolio possible in any given stock universe across global and domestic markets.

Index constituents are sourced from the FTSE All-World Index and are weighted so that each effective risk factor contributes equally to the risk of the portfolio, as opposed to a market capitalisation-weighted basis.

The link up with Amundi, which as of April 2012 had $9.4bn in assets under management in ETFs, is seen as likely to accelerate the potential roll out of TOBAM-based strategies in ETF format.