He’s hoping that his recent deal -- the sale of NewBridge Partners to Victory Capital Management, which closed June 30 -- will have a less acrimonious outcome than did the 1992 purchase of Campbell, Cowperthwait & Co. by U.S. Trust Corp.
Although U.S. Trust ponied up a handsome $400 million for Campbell Cowperthwait, it failed to retain Cowperthwait and his management team beyond the expiration of their lockup contracts in 1999, a few months before U.S. Trust began negotiations leading to its own takeover by Charles Schwab Corp. Things got ugly when Cowperthwait started NewBridge Partners and within a year lured $4 billion in assets and all but two of his 26 former staffers away from U.S. Trust. The latter sued to prevent further poaching and eventually settled for a modest, undisclosed payment from NewBridge.
Victory, a unit of Cleveland-based banking company KeyCorp that manages $60 billion in assets, hasn’t revealed how much it is paying for the $2 billion-in-assets New York firm, which has been renamed Victory NewBridge. But to keep Cowperthwait in place as CIO, along with several others who have been together since the U.S. Trust years, Victory president and CEO Rick Buoncore says he dangled “a five-year earn-out incentive, based on incremental revenues, that could be greater than the up-front payment.” Cowperthwait says he has a good feeling about the partnership -- and not just because NewBridge’s growth style complements Victory’s value orientation or because NewBridge can take advantage of the Cleveland firm’s greater staff, research and client service resources. “We liked each other’s body language, and [the agreement] assured the continuity of the firm and satisfied me and my estate,” says the 65-year-old Cowperthwait. Does that mean he’s contemplating retirement? “I still have three to five years to go -- but I’ve been saying that for a long time, and I never seem to get there.”
