FBK Finecobank SpA

MILAN—UniCredit SpA agreed to sell its asset-management unit Pioneer Investments to France's Amundi SA for €3.88 billion ($4.10 billion), bolstering its capital buffers as it tries to meet tougher new banking regulations.

Amundi will pay UniCredit €3.55 billion in cash and a special dividend of €315 million before the transaction closes.

The sale of Pioneer, which manages assets worth €225.8 billion, is part of a broader plan that UniCredit is set to announce on Tuesday to strengthen its finances.

The bank is under increased scrutiny. The sale of Pioneer and Unicredit's restructuring plan coincide with political turmoil in Italy after the resignation of Prime Minister Matteo Renzi last week following a 'no vote' in a referendum on constitutional reform he had backed. Premier-designate Paolo Gentiloni is trying this week to form a new government.

Italian lenders in general have been battered by investor anxiety about the robustness of the country's banking system, which is struggling with bad loans and low profitability.

The sale of Pioneer is the latest in a number of disposals UniCredit has made. It sold a 30% stake in FinecoBank SpA and a 10% stake in Bank Pekao SA since the end of the second quarter. This helped raise its common equity tier 1 ratio with fully applied Basel 3 rules—a commonly used measure of a bank's financial health—to 10.82%, from 10.33% at the end of the second quarter.

UniCredit said it expects to book a consolidated net capital gain next year of €2.2 billion from the sale of Pioneer—the transaction is expected to close early in 2017—which would improve the bank's fully loaded common equity tier 1 ratio by 0.78 percentage point.

UniCredit and Amundi have agreed to form a 10-year partnership to distribute their asset-management products in Italy, Germany and Austria.

For Amundi, the Pioneer deal turns it into the world's eighth largest asset manager, according to main shareholder Credit Agricole SA of France, handling €1.28 trillion in assets.

-- Inti Landauro in Paris contributed to this article.

Write to Eric Sylvers at eric.sylvers@wsj.com

(END) Dow Jones Newswires

December 12, 2016 04:15 ET (09:15 GMT)

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