Spotlight: A PEI Podcast PEI Group

This series is sponsored by AlixPartners
The Disruption Matters special podcast miniseries is back for season three: AI and the future of value creation. This year, leading industry experts will discuss how private markets can best use today’s technologies to create value.
In this first episode, The digital promise: Threats and opportunities, we set the stage by getting a reality check around what today’s AI solutions can and can’t do. While AI-related tech has enormous potential, firms need to select their use cases wisely, tailored to the unique needs of a given business. And like any other technology, it’s only as good as its implementation, which is still governed by the timeless demands of any change management. But managers don’t have the luxury of waiting for others to develop best practices; at the current pace of innovation, there’s too great a risk of being left behind.
Guests in this episode include Jason McDannold and Hoyoung Pak, partners and managing directors at AlixPartners; David Bonasia, head of value creation for the Americas for Brookfield Asset Management’s PE business; Blythe Masters, a founding partner of Motive Partners; Ashish Chandarana, head of portfolio optimisation and partner at Veritas Capital; Luke Chan, a partner with HighVista Strategies; Michael Zeller, head, AI strategy and solutions at Temasek; and Catherine Brien, a partner and managing director at AlixPartners.
Clips:-2001: A Space Odyssey. Stanley Kubrick Productions, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke.-The Terminator. Hemdale, Pacific Western Productions, Euro Film Funding Cinema '84, Orion Pictures, James Cameron, Gale Anne Hurd.-Her. Warner Bros Pictures, Annapurna Pictures, Spike Jonze.

The PEI 300 ranking of private equity's biggest fundraisers is becoming an even more exclusive club: this year, a manager needed to have raised at least $2.3 billion over the preceding five-year period, up from $2.08 billion in the previous ranking.
The 300 firms in this year's ranking raised a whopping $3.28 trillion between them – a 6 percent year-on-year increase. In the top 10 alone, these firms raised $741 billion, up more than $10 billion from the previous ranking.
In this episode of Spotlight, PEI senior editor Adam Le, Americas correspondent Hannah Zhang and Hong Kong bureau chief Alex Lynn delve into the figures of this year's PEI 300 to look at a few trends including: GP stakes firms' positions in the ranking; the movement of Asia-Pacific-headquartered firms in the list; and why GP-LP communication is more important than ever when it comes to fundraising.

The private equity industry has been pushing for more gender equality among GPs, LPs and intermediaries over the past decade, and the trend is now taking hold in the secondaries market, where diversity issues have historically received less attention.
In recent years, women across secondaries have been advocating for empowerment movements and forming support groups, including the Women in Secondaries network launched by Coller Capital and Akin Gump in 2020, as well as the WINS initiative backed in 2021 by five industry professionals representing the buyside, advisory, lending and legal sectors.
For those who have made it to senior roles, the priority is to retain, promote and elevate other women. In this eighth episode of the Decade of Secondaries Investing miniseries, Americas correspondent Hannah Zhang sits down with two women pioneers to discuss how the secondaries industry can promote gender equality. They are Francesca Paveri, senior managing director at investment bank Evercore, and Tori Buffery, senior director of secondaries at Nicola Wealth and senior adviser at Morningside Capital.
For full coverage of our Decade of Secondaries Investing series, including all podcast episodes and an interactive timeline, click here.

Specialised secondaries strategies are becoming an increasingly important part of the market. According to data complied by Secondaries Investor, 85 percent of the capital raised by secondaries funds in final closes last year was for private equity strategies; the remainder of this was for non-PE strategies, and the year before that more than one-third of capital raised was for non-PE strategies.
There is also increasing specialisation within private equity secondaries, as firms including Lexington Partners, Strategic Partners, AlpInvest Partners and LGT Capital Partners carve out teams to focus on single-asset continuation funds.
In episode seven of the Decade of Secondaries Investing miniseries, senior editor Adam Le sits down with Jeremy Coller, chief investment officer and managing partner at Coller Capital, and Yann Robard, managing partner at Dawson Partners, to discuss how far the asset class has come in terms of specialisation and cross-asset-class appeal.
For full coverage of our Decade of Secondaries Investing series, including all podcast episodes and an interactive timeline, click here.
Listen: "Everything you wanted to know about preferred equity"

This episode is sponsored by Nuveen Infrastructure and NextEnergy Capital
Clean energy is key to turning the world’s net-zero ambitions into a reality, an argument few would contest. So the IEA’s 2023 World Energy Investment report, which showed that clean energy investing rose at a faster rate than investment in fossil fuels in the period between 2021 and 2023, offers plenty of cause for optimism that the world is on the right path to tackling the climate crisis.
But it’s not moving fast enough, according to the United Nations, which has warned that government commitments are falling well short of what’s required to deliver net zero by 2050. It says that billions in capital must be ploughed into the energy transition to end reliance on polluting fuels.
In this episode of Spotlight, Infrastructure Investor’s Helen Lewer speaks to Joost Bergsma, global head of clean energy at Nuveen Infrastructure, and Michael Bonte-Friedheim, founder and group CEO of NextEnergy Capital, to gauge whether institutional capital’s loyalty to the agenda has wavered amid a difficult fundraising backdrop. Their conclusion? With many LPs under-allocated to infrastructure and the fundamentals for clean energy investing still sound, they expect more capital to flow into the space in 2024 and beyond. But managers with track records will have an edge in the competition for capital.

Post-global financial crisis, many institutional investors were forced sellers, offloading private markets exposure at hefty discounts. More than a decade on, these same institutional investors have become repeat sellers on the secondaries market, using the tool as a way to proactively manage their portfolios. How has LP sentiment toward the secondaries market changed, and what is the outlook for this mainstay of the sub-sector?
In this sixth episode of the Decade of Secondaries Investing miniseries, Secondaries Investor senior reporter Madeleine Farman sits down with Jeffrey Keay, managing director at HarbourVest Partners, and Adrian Millan, partner at PJT Park Hill. Keay and Millan take a deep dive into LP portfolio management and look at how institutional investors are using secondaries as a tool to manage private markets exposure.
We look into the evolution of programmatic secondaries sales and explore the drivers and dynamics behind why some institutional investors are repeat sellers of private markets exposure.
For full coverage of our Decade of Secondaries Investing series, including all podcast episodes and an interactive timeline, click here
Read: "Liquidity the primary use case for GPs looking to enter secondaries processes – PJT"
Read: "Evercore: distressed sellers 1% of 2013 market volume"