EUROPE – Northern Trust Global Investments says it is in manager-of-manager distribution talks with Dutch and German banks.

The moves come as NTGI says it is becoming “more involved” in Europe.

Gordon Hogarth, head of business development at NTGI Europe, said: “We are talking to a Dutch bank at the moment which will hopefully bear fruit.” He added that NTGI was also talking to German banks. He declined to name the banks.

“We’re becoming more involved in Europe,” Hogarth said, adding that NTGI would seek relationships in each of the countries, as there is not a homogonous market.

He said manager-of-managers has “much less than one percent” of the continental European institutional market. “We’ve a long, long way to go.” He added that NTGI manages four billion dollars in continental Europe across all asset classes and investment styles.

NTGI, part of Chicago-based Northern Trust, has a distribution agreement with Italian financial services firm Mediolanum covering Italy and Spain and manages 600 million euros for it.

NTGI today announced a distribution deal with UK financial services group Prudential to provide the UK defined contribution market access to manager-of-manager funds. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.

“We looked at Northern Trust, Frank Russell and SEI and appointed Northern Trust as our lead partner in this initiative because of the strength of their research process and their strong investment performance,” said Andy Briggs, director of business to business at Prudential UK.

Amit Popat, head of UK business development at NTGI, said the Prudential has a “great name, great reputation”. “It really is a good relationship for us.”

Earlier this month Northern named State Street Global Advisors’ Kevin Hardy as European director of transition management.

Topics