Lord Abbett Departmental Name Change Signifies SMA Growth

Lord Abbett’s Private Advisory Services Department is now known as the Separately Managed Accounts (SMA) Department, a name switch it says stems from the increasing popularity of the SMA industry.

According to Mark Pennington, the department’s director, the $440 billion that the SMA industry has amassed as of June 2003 is just about where the mutual fund industry was in 1986. Despite the name change, strategies and other orders of business will remain the same for Lord Abbett, a 13-year-old Jersey City, N.J., firm that has gone from $3 billion to $15 billion in assets over the past three years.