TORONTO, ON; WELLESLEY, MA; MONUMENT, CO, Feb. 1, 2023 /CNW/ - Sun Life Financial Inc. (TSX: SLF) (NYSE: SLF) ("Sun Life") today announced the completion of its acquisition of a 51%1 stake in Advisors Asset Management, Inc. ("AAM"), a leading independent U.S. retail distribution firm. AAM will be part of SLC Management, Sun Life's institutional fixed income and alternatives asset manager. AAM will become the U.S. retail distribution arm of SLC Management.
AAM provides a range of solutions and products to financial advisors at wirehouses, registered investment advisors and independent broker-dealers. AAM will have exclusive rights to market and promote SLC Management's specified alternative investment products to the U.S. retail market. AAM oversees US$40.5 billion (approximately C$55 billion) in assets as of December 31, 2022. With 10 offices across nine U.S. states, AAM has a team of more than 270 professionals.
With the growing demand among high-net-worth ("HNW") retail investors for alternative assets in the U.S., the acquisition of a majority stake in AAM will allow SLC Management and its affiliated investment managers, BentallGreenOak, Crescent Capital Group and InfraRed Capital Partners, to offer their investment strategies to the U.S. HNW market. The transaction is also strategic for AAM, which will expand its product roster to include a range of alternative products in commercial real estate, private credit and infrastructure.
The transaction includes a put / call option, pursuant to which Sun Life may acquire the remaining outstanding ownership interests of AAM starting in 2028. AAM will continue to operate under its current leadership and will retain its individual brand, office locations and clients.
The original news release related to this announcement is available here.
Note to editors: All figures in Canadian dollars unless otherwise stated.
About Sun Life
Sun Life is a leading international financial services organization providing asset management, wealth, insurance and health solutions to individual and institutional Clients. Sun Life has operations in a number of markets worldwide, including Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Japan, Indonesia, India, China, Australia, Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia and Bermuda. As of September 30, 2022, Sun Life had total assets under management of $1.27 trillion. For more information please visit www.sunlife.com.
Sun Life Financial Inc. trades on the Toronto (TSX), New York (NYSE) and Philippine (PSE) stock exchanges under the ticker symbol SLF.
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1 51% ownership interest is calculated on a fully diluted basis |
About SLC Management
SLC Management is a global institutional asset manager that offers institutional investors traditional, alternative and yield-orientated investment solutions across public and private fixed income markets, as well as global real estate equity and debt. SLC Management is the brand name for the institutional asset management business of Sun Life Financial Inc. under which the entities of Sun Life Capital Management (U.S.) LLC in the United States, and Sun Life Capital Management (Canada) Inc. in Canada operate. These entities are also referred to as SLC Fixed Income and represent the investment grade public and private fixed income strategies of SLC Management.
BentallGreenOak, InfraRed Capital Partners (InfraRed) and Crescent Capital Group (Crescent) are also part of SLC Management. BentallGreenOak is a leading, global real estate investment management advisor and a globally recognized provider of real estate services. InfraRed is an international investment manager focused on infrastructure, managing equity capital in multiple private and listed funds, primarily for institutional investors across the globe. Crescent is a global alternative credit investment asset manager registered with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission as an investment adviser. Crescent provides private credit financing (including senior, unitranche and junior debt) to middle-market companies in the U.S. and Europe and invests in high-yield bonds and broadly syndicated loans.
As of September 30, 2022, SLC Management has assets under management of C$353 billion (US$255 billion).
For more information, please visit slcmanagement.com.
CRN: SLC-20230127-2704013
About Advisors Asset Management
For over 40 years, AAM has been a trusted resource for financial advisors and broker/dealers. It offers access to unit investment trusts (UITs), open- and closed-end mutual funds, separately managed accounts (SMAs), structured products, the fixed income markets, portfolio analytics and exchange-traded funds (ETFs). For more information, visit www.aamlive.com.
As of December 31, 2022, the brokerage and advised business at AAM represents approximately US$40.5 billion in assets. (Assets under supervision represent US$5.4 billion in UIT assets. The firm has US$31.4 billion in assets under administration that represents the non-proprietary assets for which AAM provides various levels of service, but not management. The firm's US$3.7 billion in assets under management represents AAM's proprietary separately managed account, mutual fund and ETF assets.)
Advisors Asset Management, Inc. (AAM) is a SEC-registered investment advisor and member FINRA/SIPC.
CRN 2023-0126-10609 R
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Sun Life Media Relations Contact: |
Sun Life Investor Relations Contact: |
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Rajani Kamath |
Yaniv Bitton |
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Associate Vice-President |
Vice-President, Head of |
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Corporate Communications |
Investor Relations & Capital Markets |
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647-515-7514 |
416-979-6496 |
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SLC Management Media Relations Contact: |
Advisors Asset Management Media Relations Contact: |
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Hannah Stewart |
Matthew Bono |
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Associate Director, Communications |
Account Executive, JConnelly |
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416-557-4428 |
973-590-9110 |
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mbono@jconnelly.com |
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SOURCE Sun Life Financial Inc.
View original content to download multimedia: http://www.newswire.ca/en/releases/archive/February2023/01/c0440.html
Are aliens using a quirk of the sun's gravity to transmit information through an interstellar communication network? For the first time ever, astronomers explored this intriguing possibility and scanned for signals coming from hidden nonhuman probes orbiting the sun.
So far, the method hasn't turned up signs of spacefaring aliens, but it represents a promising new avenue of hunting for aliens as part of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI).
The new search strategy rests on the findings of Albert Einstein, who showed in 1915 that gravity warps the fabric of space-time. This means that massive objects, like stars and galaxies, bend light around them. This effect, known as gravitational lensing, allows scientists to see extremely distant objects whose light has been warped by enormous foreground galaxies and galactic clusters.
"It's a lot like a magnifying glass," Nicholas Tusay, a graduate student at Penn State, told Live Science.
With both gravitational lensing and a magnifying glass, the magnification works best when a person or detector is positioned at a specific place known as the focal point, he said.
The sun's gravitational focal point starts at roughly 550 astronomical units (AU), or 550 times the distance between Earth and the sun, Tusay said. A telescope placed at this spot would have mind-blowing abilities — it could resolve continents and mountains on a planet orbiting another star, he added.
"Light goes both ways," Tusay said. "If you can magnify light coming to you, you can also magnify light going out."
This means gravitational lensing also can be used to efficiently send signals across interstellar distances, so scientists have speculated about tech-savvy aliens placing probes at the focal points of stars, effectively turning them into a gigantic point-to-point communication network.
To test this idea, Tusay and his colleagues used the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia to conduct six five-minute scans for radio signals coming from the sun's gravitational focal point. And what did they find?
"Nothing," he said. "To state it accurately: In the frequencies we observed, during the time we observed, we found no compelling signals that were extraterrestrial in origin."
The results were published last summer in The Astronomical Journal and were presented last week by Tusay at the 241st meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.
While the findings aren't yet evidence of ET, Tusay said it's possible that alien probes placed at the sun's gravitational focal point turn on only from time to time. And other stars have properties that make them better nodes in a gigantic space internet, so these could be additional search targets, he added. He sees the method as more of a proof-of-concept that might turn up something interesting if conducted for longer and with more resources.
"We're always talking about new ways to search in the field of SETI," Julia DeMarines, an astrobiologist at the University of California, Berkeley who was not involved in the work, told Live Science. "This is the first time I've seen a dedicated search to this specific possibility of intercepting messages."
When nothing is seen in a SETI search, it could mean several things, she added, including that nobody is out there communicating, or merely that nobody is communicating in these ways. Any new search method is always welcome, DeMarines said. "If you don't look," she added, "then you'll never know."
A medium-sized solar flare briefly blocked shortwave radio Tuesday (Feb. 7).
The active sun fired off several solar flares in accurate days, with one causing a momentary lapse in shortwave communications over the Pacific Ocean at 6:07 p.m. EST (2307 GMT), according to SpaceWeather.com (opens in new tab).
The originating area is a huge Earth-facing sunspot, AR3213, which currently stretches across 62,000 miles (100,000 km) of the surface of the sun. Magnetic tangling in the sunspot caused the lines to "snap," firing off charged solar particles towards our planet via a medium-class (M6) flare.
Related: Strange unprecedented vortex spotted around the sun's north pole
The sun is climbing towards a peak in its 11-year cycle that it should reach in 2025. There's ample evidence of the sun firing off flares already in pictures and videos from sun-gazing satellites, like NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory. These were shared extensively by users on Twitter.
Most solar activity is harmless and just causes brief interruptions in shortwave, but the sun is able to generate more powerful bursts of energy that can knock out satellites or other infrastructure.
As such, NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) partner with entities around the world to keep a 24/7 watch on our solar neighbor through telescopes, satellites and other observations in multiple wavelengths.
Burgeoning science also seeks to better understand how solar activity originates. For example, NASA's Parker Solar Probe and ESA's Solar Orbiter both swoop within a close range of the sun to demo the solar wind of particles that stream through the solar system, and to examine solar structures and the sun's atmosphere up close.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
A big solar outburst over the weekend might produce bright auroras here on Earth tonight (Feb. 14).
The sun blasted a powerful X-class flare into space on Saturday (Feb. 11), an outburst accompanied by an eruption of solar plasma known as a coronal mass ejection (CME). Some of the CME particles could hit Earth's upper atmosphere late on Valentine's Day (Tuesday, Feb. 14) and create shining auroras, experts said.
"Minor G1-class geomagnetic storms are possible on Feb. 14 and 15 when one or more CMEs could deliver glancing blows to Earth's magnetic field," SpaceWeather.com wrote (opens in new tab) of the event.
More activity might be coming from "a number of sunspot groups [that] are present on the visible solar disk," added the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in a Monday (Feb. 13) update (opens in new tab). These sunspots may generate medium-sized or M-class flares in the coming days, NOAA added.
Related: The sun just erupted with a major X-class solar flare. Here's what it looked like on video
The sun will reach the peak of its current 11-year activity cycle around 2025, but most of the sun storms don't affect us much. Brief interruptions can happen in shortwave, and particles associated with CMEs may supercharge auroras, which are shining lights high in our atmosphere caused by solar particles interacting with molecules in Earth's atmosphere.
NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA) partner with telescopes around the world to keep an eye on the sun, just in case it happens to blast out something a bit stronger that would affect power lines or satellite communications.
The agencies also run a number of sun-gazing spacecraft, as well as missions that swoop close to the sun to learn more about its activity. NASA's Parker Solar Probe and ESA's Solar Orbiter sample the solar wind — particles streaming from the sun — and take a look at solar structures and the sun's atmosphere from a relatively close-up view.
Elizabeth Howell is the co-author of "Why Am I Taller (opens in new tab)?" (ECW Press, 2022; with Canadian astronaut Dave Williams), a book about space medicine. Follow her on Twitter @howellspace (opens in new tab). Follow us on Twitter @Spacedotcom (opens in new tab) or Facebook (opens in new tab).
