By Emiliano Mellino and Freya Berry
LONDON (Reuters) - French firm Amundi has picked banks for its Paris stock market flotation this year, two sources familiar with the situation said on Friday, as Europe's biggest asset manager gears up for a potential 7 billion euro (£5.12 billion) listing.
Amundi, a subsidiary of Credit Agricole (PA:CAGR) and Societe Generale (PA:SOGN), has lined up JP Morgan (N:JPM) and Morgan Stanley (N:MS) as global coordinators for the deal.
Societe Generale and Credit Agricole will themselves also lead the transaction, the sources said.
Goldman Sachs (N:GS) and BofA Merrill Lynch (N:BAC) are acting as bookrunners, they added.
All parties involved declined to comment.
Societe Generale has said it could sell all of its 20 percent stake in the asset manager. Credit Agricole, which holds the remaining 80 percent, has said it plans to stay on as a majority shareholder.
Timing for the listing is yet to be determined but the deal is likely to come in the fourth quarter of this year, around November, two of the sources said. The timing for analyst meetings has not yet been confirmed, one of them added.
Some early meetings with potential investors, known as "pilot-fishing", have already taken place, a third source said.
Only a handful of European asset managers are listed on the stock market. Private equity-backed Italian asset manager Anima (MI:ANIM) floated on the Milan stock exchange last year in a deal that saw demand for the stock surpass by more than five times the size of the offer.
The stock that was valued at 4.2 euros at the time of the listing was trading on Friday at 1500 GMT at 8.6 euros.
Amundi has 954 billion euros of global assets under management. It is Europe's biggest asset manager and the tenth largest in the world, according to British publication Investment & Pensions Europe's 2015 asset manager survey.
The business was created as a joint venture in 2010.