Embracing the journey

PEI roundtable podcast on the secondaries market in the last decade

Private equity 18 Jul 2024 2 min read

Jochen Mende

Head of Secondaries

The global secondaries market has grown from roughly USD 47 billion in 2014 to more than USD 100 billion today as fund investors and fund managers alike have embraced the secondary market as a tool to actively manage their respective portfolios.

In the penultimate episode of the Decade of Secondaries Investing podcast miniseries, PEI sat down with Jochen Mende, Head of Private Equity Secondaries at UBS Asset Management, and Bruno Bertrand-Delfau, Partner and Co-Head of Secondaries Transactions and Liquidity Solutions at Proskauer Rose. The pair discuss how the secondaries market has developed over the past decade, how the European and North American market compare and what’s in store for GP-led and LP-led transactions globally.

Below is a top level summary of the discussion, click on the link to listen in to the full episode.

Now is a very good time to enter the asset class for investors, especially via the small deal segment which is characterized by a larger number of potential sellers and is relatively underserved by the buyer and broker community.
The robust growth of transaction volumes is expected to continue in the coming years, driven, among other things, by a further increased acceptance of secondaries by investors and fund managers alike and the use of secondaries in other sub-asset classes such as private credit and infrastructure.
Intermediation has increased across the board: it is estimated that 80 to 85 percent of all transactions are intermediated, particularly on the GP-led side and for larger LP-led deals, less so for smaller LP-led deals that allow sourcing outside of broad auctions.
The HNW channel is expected to become a much bigger segment of the investor base, aided by a proliferation of fully paid-in, semi-liquid structures which provide easier access to the asset class at lower minimum investment sizes.