Wellington Management to Buy Hartford Funds and Make Its Own Fund Family

Wellington Management Company on Wednesday said it would acquire Hartford Funds, many of whose strategies the venerable institutional manager has subadvised for decades. The deal is expected to close in 2027’s first quarter, subject to customary approvals, and internalizes roughly $130 billion (as of April 30, 2026) of Boston-based Wellington’s $1.35 trillion. Hartford Funds’ total assets under management are $160 billion, including Wellington’s portion.

Nearly 100 years old, Wellington has matured as a large institutional asset manager, with clients including pension plans, endowments and foundations, and insurance companies, among other types. Although it has few of its own mutual funds globally—including just one in the US as of today—it invests on behalf of regular fund investors through its multi-decades-long and currently substantial relationships with both Vanguard and Hartford Funds, as well as other, smaller mandates. Altogether, mutual funds, exchange-traded funds, and like vehicles outside the US comprise nearly half of the firm’s assets. For most of these funds, Wellington served as subadvisor, happy to build portfolios under someone else’s brand.

Why Now?

Over the past year and a half, though, Wellington has been coming out of the woodwork, particularly in the advisor market, where it has been less well known. It launched its first US mutual fund. It hired Christina Kopec Rooney into a new Head of US Wealth role. It presented a new advertising campaign highlighting its institutional capabilities and invited investors and advisors to “get to know” the firm. And now, it is buying Hartford Funds, the fund family of insurance company The Hartford, which will be rebranded as Wellington.

Financial advisors serving US investors dominate Hartford Funds’ business. Although it has offered ETFs for some time, most of its assets are in open-end mutual funds. It has mostly served as a financial-intermediary gateway to Wellington and to the UK’s Schroders, which pulled its US retail funds in 2016, when Hartford Funds adopted 10 of its mutual funds.

The announcement comes at an interesting time for both firms. Wellington’s outreach indicates a desire to diversify its client base. As defined-benefit plan assets continue to shrink in favor of defined-contribution plans, it makes sense for Wellington to want a more direct conduit to advisors, who also have been targeted by firms that offer private market funds, including Wellington. Hartford Funds, being a US-focused, actively managed mutual fund company, has suffered outflows in most of the past 15 years, as passive strategies have increased their market share. As investors have sought lower-cost funds, Hartford Funds’ comparatively expensive subadvised funds haven’t been a help, either.

What’s Next?

Most Hartford Funds investors will experience little change, though fee cuts would be nice. Two important questions remain unanswered. One, what happens to the Schroders-run Hartford funds? It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Wellington take over those mandates. Schroders is slated to be acquired by Nuveen, a serious competitor in the wealth channel, and broad-based Wellington can likely provide suitable alternatives. Hartford Funds’ fund board will meet in September 2026 to decide all the funds’ investment-management contracts as part of its regular review process.

Second, and perhaps more interesting, is what happens to Wellington’s relationship with Vanguard. Wellington runs some of Vanguard’s oldest and largest actively managed funds, though altogether, Vanguard’s active business is less than 20% of its assets.