Weekly Fund Distribution Notes – 11 February 2025

5th March 2025

Alternative and big asset manager partnerships shaking up Wall Street? Meanwhile, on the Côte d’Azur, despite all the glamour and buzz, a notable shift in tone, buzzwords and expectations could be felt at the annual IPEM conference focusing on private markets for private wealth. Also, some buy-side news and costs are not the key factor in winning over more retail investors.

Last week, we addressed Blackstone’s new distribution partnerships with Deutsche Bank, quoting the firm as saying that “the group has partnerships with pretty much all of the major players in the market and continues to add distributors.” Later last Tuesday, the Financial Times reported on Apollo’s Q4 earnings call, with Apollo CEO Marc Rowan saying, “a wave of partnerships between alternative and big asset managers will shake up Wall Street. Companies such as Apollo could create co-branded investment funds or ‘massive managed accounts’ with traditional asset managers.” 

Well, this is not new, but the pace and scale may well increase. However, it is vital to understand each stakeholder’s motives and the associated risks. In this context, let’s recall a quote from Boutros Thiery, Head of Investments at Mercer France in Citywire Selector last September: “When there are failures in private markets in five years, due to the structure of certain solutions, it will impact the credibility of everyone in the space.” 

Meanwhile, on the Côte d’Azur in Cannes during the annual IPEM conference, despite the (partly overly) positive provider buzz, nuances of caution have also become more pronounced. Citywire Selector picked up interesting impressions from this year’s event, which was mainly wealth-focused, as opposed to the primarily institutional-focused event in previous years. The first sub headline, “everyone hates the term semi-liquid” clearly caught our attention. Citywire described a similar sensation on the term “democratisation”, as people made an effort to avoid it, which in itself provides some good food for thought. 

The second article theme / sub headline “‘not everyone has the right to win’: Why a blow-up will happen” in the context of the space becoming overcrowded also caught increasing attention. The quote from Peter Beske Nielsen, global head of private wealth at Swedish private equity (PE) giant EQT, that “there will be a blow-up in evergreens – I just hope that when it does happen, it doesn’t affect all of us”, adds seamlessly to Thiery’s quote above. In this context, Citywire stated that the tone of private market selectors present in Cannes suggested there was a preference towards large, established firms that have a good pipeline of potential deals on their books – which is also reflected in our chart of the week below.  

Whilst we certainly believe in private markets serving an important function, you know that we always questioned if there is a certain misconception between providers rushing into semi-liquid propositions and the alleged demand from the buy-side. Unsurprisingly, the pretty and rather unusually upfront quote from Mark Serocold, head of EMEA wealth management solutions at Ares, caught our attention: “There has been resistance to taking on private markets in some regions. You can only feed the ducks when they’re quacking, and not many are quacking at the moment. We’re facing resistance from both bankers and underlying clients.”

What else? In terms of the buy-side, Citywire ran a feature on NN Insurance Belgium’s Evert Van Meeuwen, Banco Sabadell hired fund selector Patricia Ribelles from Orienta Wealth, and CPR Asset Management (an Amundi subsidiary) launched an Eltif 2.0 listed & unlisted FoF.

Listening to a lot of regulator and ETF provider talk, one may conclude that it is the costs which keep the broad retail audience away from investment funds. Well, we never bought this – not at all. In this context, last week Ignites Europe quoted Tanguy van de Werve, director-general of EFAMA, as saying that he was “convinced 200 per cent that costs are not the main driver of a lack of retail investment in the EU. The main reason why most of our citizens in the EU are not invested in capital markets has nothing to do with cost, it’s about risk aversion. The EU’s retail investment strategy will do absolutely nothing to boost retail investment because it focused too heavily on costs.”