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Butterfield gains array of new owners

New York debut: from left, Michael Dunkley, the Premier, with Butterfield's chairman Barclay Simmons and CEO Michael Collins on the day of the bank's IPO in September

Butterfield Bank gained some massive new shareholders — including some of the biggest names on Wall Street — as a result of its initial public offering on the New York Stock Exchange in September.

Regulatory filings show an impressive breadth of institutional support for the offering, with 12 asset managers having holdings of more than $10 million in Butterfield, as of the end of September — and the value of those shares has risen more than 31 per cent since then.

Butterfield’s IPO proved to be well timed. Expectations of higher interest rates, raised further by Donald Trump’s victory in the US presidential election, have resulted in the market turning bullish on the banking sector as a whole.

A basket of mainly bank stocks, known as the Financial Select Sector SPDR ETF, which trades as XLF, rose 21 per cent from the close of trading on September 15, the day before Butterfield’s NYSE debut, through yesterday.

Butterfield’s shares have outperformed even this remarkable rally. Yesterday, the bank’s New York-listed shares closed on $32.76, more than 38 per cent above the IPO price of $23.50.

Most of that increase has come since the end of September, when Butterfield’s share price closed at $24.76.

Holders of the bank’s Bermuda Stock Exchange-listed shares, which closed on $31 yesterday, have enjoyed the ride too.

US regulatory filings show that Carlyle Group, which originally invested about $150 million in Butterfield as part of a recapitalisation of the bank in 2010, remains the largest shareholder with 7.63 million shares, valued at $189 million as of the end of September. The private-equity firm planned to offload 17.5 per cent of its shareholding during the IPO.

However, the second-largest shareholder was a newcomer — Wellington Management Group LLP, whose holding of 5.27 million shares was worth $130.5 million.

Though this comprises a major shareholding in the bank it’s a small investment for Wellington, an 88-year-old Philadelphia-based global asset manager with nearly $1 trillion under management.

Another new shareholder is Rovida Advisors Inc, now the bank’s third-largest owner with two million shares that were worth $49.6 million. The investment is Rovida’s second largest holding and represents just shy of a quarter of the firm’s total $201 million portfolio.

The Wellcome Trust — another firm to invest in the 2010 recapitalisation — continued to hold the fourth largest stake of 1.8 million shares worth nearly $46 million.

But then come a string of new investors, the biggest being Alyeska Investment Group, led by Anand Parekh, which bought a $39.6 million position in the stock, comprising 0.4 per cent of its portfolio.

FMR LLC, the US investment arm of fund management giant Fidelity Investments, loaded up with 1.29 million Butterfield shares that were worth $32 million at the end of September.

Asset managers Southpoint Capital Advisiors ($16.3 million), Millennium Management ($15.3 million), Hotchkis & Wiley Capital management ($14.5 million), NWQ Investment Management ($13.5 million), Philadelphia Financial Management ($12.2 million) and Citadel Advisors ($11.6 million) all had stakes with eight-figure valuations at the end of the third quarter.

Some better known names also partook in the offering, including Goldman Sachs ($6.1 million), Bank of New York Mellon ($1.1 million), Morgan Stanley ($1.1 million) and Bank of America ($348,000).