Citigroup Asset Management’s former SMA exec turns to institutional manager. Separately managed account (SMA) pioneer Peter Cieszko has left Legg Mason to join Evergreen Investments, Wachovia’s institutional asset-management business. Neither Legg Mason nor Evergreen could comment on the news as of deadline on Monday. Legg Mason said it would release a statement on Cieszko’s appointment today.

Cieszko was one of Citigroup Asset Management’s (CAM) top executives when it was exchanged for Legg Mason’s brokerage business, about $1.5 billion in Legg Mason common stock and a $550-million loan from Citi’s investment bank.

Visionary

As head of CAM’s U.S. retail and high-net-worth group from 2000, Cieszko presided over the biggest SMA production complex in the business, with about $63.3 billion in assets under management by the time of the handover to Legg Mason at the end of 2005.

A hallmark of Cieszko’s tenure at CAM was the rise of the multiple-discipline account (MDA) – a kind of SMA that bundles complementary investment styles in a single registered account. CAM had been fiddling with MDAs for six or seven years already when Cieszko took over the division’s SMA business – and gave them the push they needed to achieve prominence.

“Peter is a great leader and a true visionary in the asset management industry,” says Jamie Waller, COO of Fugent , a Rye, N.Y.-based online collaboration-platform provider to the financial-service industry and former head of CAM’s third-party investment platform. “He sees opportunity long before others are even aware of the changes afoot.”

Daniel Seivert, managing partner of Los Angeles-based 3C Financial Partners, an investment bank and strategic consultancy to wealth-management firms, has a similarly high opinion of Cieszko. “He has had a long tenure at the helm the industry's largest managed account vessel,” says Seivert. “Experience like that is bound to make him a strategic asset to any management firm.” –FWR

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