Bank of NY Mellon eyes asset management M&A: report

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Bank of New York Mellon Corp (BK.N: Quote, Profile, Research) Chief Executive Robert Kelly would like to expand the company's $880 billion asset management business with acquisitions, Bloomberg News said on Thursday.

"What we're interested in is products that we don't have today," Kelly was quoted as saying in an interview Wednesday. "We've very big in the active space," he said, referring to investments that managers and analysts select for clients.

The bank did not immediately return requests for comment.

Last month, Jon Little, a vice chairman of BNY Mellon Asset Management, told a conference in London the bank did not need to do asset management acquisitions for a decade, but would consider them.

"It either has to bring us distribution that we don't have (or) it brought in significant, really interesting, unique capabilities that we either didn't have, or that we needed more of," he said. "To give an example, we don't think we should have hundreds of boutiques, but on the other hand, we don't mind product overlap."

According to Thursday's report, Kelly declined to comment on whether the bank is pursuing a transaction for Barclays Plc's (BARC.L: Quote, Profile, Research) Barclays Global Investors unit, which oversees

$1.5 trillion of assets.

The bank and BlackRock Inc (BLK.N: Quote, Profile, Research) are among interested bidders for the Barclays unit, a person familiar with the matter said last month [ID:nLF70913].

Kelly has run Bank of New York Mellon since July 2007, when Bank of New York Co bought his Mellon Financial Corp.