'The more we talked, the more we realized that this could be a really good partnership for the long-term stability,' says George Mavroudis
Guardian Capital Group Limited has been around since 1962. It spent the better part of six decades as a public company, built more than a billion dollars of its own capital, and never went looking for a buyer.
That is, until now, after Guardian and Desjardins recently announced their partnership. When asked how the acquisition came together, George Mavroudis, CEO and president of Guardian Capital Group Limited, emphasized the mutual partnership would strenghen both investment's firms culture as well as bring additional growth.
"We weren't necessarily looking for a transaction because of any financial needs," said Mavroudis, who is also now CEO and president of Desjardins Global Asset Management (DGAM). “But the more we talked, the more we realized that this could be a really good partnership for the long-term stability and growth of the company.”
Mavroudis traces his global outlook to an international secondment early in his career that turned into seven years of working overseas. He had watched entrepreneurs from smaller European nations like Belgium and the Netherlands expand across borders almost by necessity, while Canadians, comfortable with a resource-rich economy and a large trading partner to the south, tended to stay close to home. Still, he shared how that comfort bred caution, and too few Canadian businesses pursued global ambitions. When he returned to Canada, he saw the country differently.
He carried that perspective into Guardian. When he joined in 2005, having come from J.P. Morgan, the firm managed $10 billion, all of it in Canadian equity and Canadian fixed income, serving a domestic client base.
Yet, despite tight insider holdings that let Guardian operate like a private company, its public market valuation was never recognized, leaving Mavroudis without a useful currency for future transactions so going private with a partner like Desjardins solved that problem and several others.
Unlike a PE firm that might flip the business in a few years, Desjardins operates without the pressure of quarterly earnings and can commit capital over decades.
"When you're building an asset management business, it really does require the patience of time because it's not transactional,” he added. “You're building track records for the long run, and then it takes time to build relationships and win over clients.”
According to Mavroudis, the cultural fit with Desjardins became clear over time rather than through any single meeting as he recalled the first real test came during the 2023 sale of Guardian's wealth business, a process he led closely.
What stood out to him was how smoothly the deal ran and how consistently constructive the people on the Desjardins side were. That experience left a strong impression, but he acknowledged the more important proof came afterward, when Guardian leaders who moved over with the business were given room to grow and went on to take on bigger roles. To him, that showed Desjardins was willing to back outside talent rather than absorb it and push it aside.
As talks later turned to Guardian's asset management arm, Mavroudis says Desjardins underscored it was interested in more than the assets themselves. The buyer wanted Guardian's leadership team to stay, which he took as a sign of respect for how the business had been built and confidence in the people running it. He also paid close attention to the coming leadership transition at the group level.
Rather than rush ahead, he wanted to see whether the next chief executive would share the same long-term outlook. When Denis Dubois took the top job, that helped settle the issue.
“He was also someone that orchestrated the strategic initiative to want to acquire our business and bought into the strategy of the long term for us,” said Mavroudis. “So it was very important at the top of the house that we have someone in place now who's going to be there for at least a decade. That is going to be very supportive of our strategy going forward.”
Mavroudis believes the combination of the merger gives the business immediate scale, lifting assets under management from $168 billion to more than $280 billion. A major part of that is fixed income, where the combined platform will have about $170 billion to work with.
“That's quite a significant pool of capital to be able to continue growing in that asset class. And especially as we expand into what I would consider the more plus extension areas, whether it be, bank loans, CLOs, eventually private credit and the like so you need scale. While we hope to be able to benefit from that partnership and access, I go back to that permanent capital that’s also there at the company. It allows us as we want to continue building out capabilities in the private asset classes,” Mavroudis explained.
He believes Desjardins already has a head start there, particularly through a private core infrastructure team that’s been built over more than a decade and now manages about $6.5 billion. That business was initially supported by the pension plan and later by the insurance company, which he sees as a model for how the combined firm can keep expanding in private markets.
He also frames the combination as an extension of Guardian's longer-term plan to become a true global asset manager rather than a business tied to one market or region. The aim is to build an organization that can serve clients internationally and offer products that travel across borders. Even with the combined firm sitting at just under C$300 billion in assets under management, he emphasized there’s still a long way to go before it reaches the scale of the world's top 100 asset managers, where the bar is closer to US$500 billion.
Consequently, he sees value in building that larger platform without giving up its Canadian identity. He presents the partnership as a way to create a business that remains headquartered in Canada while competing globally, rather than following the more familiar route of selling to foreign owners. Alongside that international ambition, he also wants the combined firm to deepen its reach at home and become more fully represented across the Canadian market.
"We need to continue to build capabilities beyond domestic. Otherwise, we're unlikely to survive a market that's going to evolve," he said, adding that over the past two decades, he built the business with that lens, recruiting people who had international experience or had worked at global firms.
"It was important that you just didn't have this provincial mindset of only your own local region that you were working in. Rather, you thought of things on a global basis," said Mavroudis.
Where he sees the greater challenge now, is in staying disciplined. With a much larger platform comes a broader set of possibilities, and he acknowledges the temptation to chase too many of them at once. For Mavroudis, the priority now is building a clear strategic plan and making sure it reaches every level of the organization as well as clients and the consultant community.
"My goal is to make sure whenever [my term] is done, not only has the plane landed smoothly, but actually it's taken off again," he said.
