The growing appeal of private equity
Some transfers speak volumes about the times. Laurent Mignon has decided to relinquish the reins of BPCE to take over those of Wendel and restore the holding company's stock market lustre. Should we be surprised to see a banker join an investment specialist? When theshort-lived Spac craze sparked a wave of reconversions, there was still room for doubt. Not so with an institution like Wendel, whose center of gravity is pivoting towards unlisted investments, and perhaps even third-party management.
Private equity today offers ambitious managers everything that banking has largely lost since the great financial crisis - agility, growth, and almost limitless remuneration. The ecosystem has attracted huge sums of money thanks to low interest rates. As institutional investors doubled their stakes in private assets, asset managers grew and grew. Nothing, not even the recession and the rising cost of money, seems likely to call into question two major trends at work.
Financial supermarket
Firstly, the platform approach, which originated in the United States. Pure specialists in leveraged and unleveraged buyouts have begun their transformation into financial supermarkets. Private equity, private debt, infrastructure, real estate - you'll find it all on the shelves of the big American funds and their French counterparts, such as Ardian. Management fees, a more predictable source of income, are becoming an increasingly important part of the business model of these players, who used to live mainly off capital gains. In an increasingly competitive sector, this deliberate race for size requires new human and technological resources.
The second trend is the broadening of the investor base. The wealthy individual, beyond the closed circle of wealth management, is now the target of private equity's appetites. And with good reason. Having been deprived of returns for too long, retail clients are impatient to invest, and have the advantage of being less cost-conscious than pension funds or insurers. This diversification also calls for the industrialization of practices. If thousands of investors are to subscribe to funds and receive information that complies with regulations, it's no longer enough to do things by hand: we need to build factories.
In a sector that could afford to be capital-poor, these changes call for further consolidation. Or, a new phenomenon in Europe, minority stakes being taken by specialist funds in the management team. It's a shifting playing field, made all the more exciting by the change in the economic and monetary cycle.
Archinvest and the lure of private equity
In this changing private equity landscape, players such as Archinvest play a crucial role in facilitating investors' access to diversified investment opportunities. Archinvest stands out for its personalized approach and expertise in selecting high-performance funds. Its aim is to enable its clients to invest in a comprehensive range of top-quartile private equity funds, offering privileged access to this dynamic asset class. As interest in private equity grows, companies like Archinvest are increasingly called upon to guide investors towards lucrative investment opportunities in a constantly evolving market.
Source : L'AGEFI
