Adam Patti says his team is "adding staff across the board" now that they're part of the New York Life Investment Management family of boutiques.

Yesterday NYLIM closed on its purchase of IndexIQ, a liquid alternatives ETF specialist with $1.7 billion in assets under management (AUM). MFWire spoke with Patti, IndexIQ's CEO, about what's next now that the deal is done.

"We're bulking up to support what we have now and the growth that we expect," Patti says. "[This is] what we need to do to become a much bigger player in the marketplace. We're trying to fill a lot holes."

When the deal was first unveiled in the fall, Patti said that his "full team" of 18 people would come over to NYLIM as part of the deal. Now he plans to expand IndexIQ's sales, operations, product development, and trading staff.

Yet Patti also looks forward to benefiting from NYLIM's MainStay [profile] marketing and distribution efforts.

"We're going to be leveraging whatever infrastructure we can from them," Patti says. "We'll be leveraging their very large sales force as the primary driver for distribution."

Patti declines to comment on what specific new products are coming from IndexIQ. (They've added two ETFs just between when the deal was announced in December and when it closed yesterday, and they also have one traditional mutual fund in addition to their 13 ETFs.) Yet he hints at NYLIM's big plans for IndexIQ's "ETF manufacturing capabilities. He calls NYLIM's multi-boutique style "a great structure" for IndexIQ to be a part of.

"[IndexIQ] really becomes a gateway for the rest of NYLIM," Patti says, adding he and his team are working on integrating with the rest of NYLIM and "prioritizing product concepts" that are on the drawing board. He hopes to file for some new products "over the next few months."

The ETF market, Patti says, is "pretty wide open right now," especially for "solutions-oriented strategies" that IndexIQ specializes in. 

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