Ares Management and Kayne Anderson Capital Advisors are to merge, creating Ares Kayne Management, an alternative asset manager with $113bn of assets under management (AuM).
Ares is a global alternative asset manager with $87bn in AuM and has been active in investing on behalf of insurance companies. Kayne is an energy and energy-infrastructure investor with AuM of $26bn.
The two companies will continue to manage their existing funds and operate under their existing brand names.
The transaction is expected to close around 1 January 2016, when Richard Kayne, the chairman and founder of Kayne Anderson, and Tony Ressler, the Ares chairman and CEO, will become co-chairmen of Ares Kayne Management.
In March, Ares Private Equity, together with property investment firm Delancey, sold the City of London's Walbrook Building to Taiwanese insurer, Cathay Life, for £580m ($877m) (IAR, 9 March 2015).
In January, Ares announced a $700m deal to invest in commercial real estate debt on behalf of an unnamed company that it described as a 'large North American specialty life insurer' (IAR, 16 January 2015).
Last year, Friends Life (absorbed by Aviva in April 2015) appointed Ares to manage a £200m ($335m) senior syndicated loans portfolio (IAR, 3 June 2014).
