The document is clear about its own posture. It describes its best practices as “designed to guide, not dictate,” and says a deal that falls short of them “is not in itself a sign of a flawed process.” Where a GP materially departs from the principles, it should be prepared to explain how LP concerns were otherwise addressed.

ILPA’s acknowledgments credit GPs, law firms, financial advisers, lenders, underwriters and other industry bodies among those who commented. The document does not say which comments drove which changes.

Why ILPA is stepping in

ILPA first issued continuation fund guidance in 2023. It is rewriting that guidance three years later because the tool has changed category, from a tail-end fix for aging funds to a mainstream exit route. The final document cites Jefferies data showing CVs accounted for roughly 14% of sponsor-backed exits globally in 2025, up from 5% in 2021. Its own framing is that GPs now treat CVs as a strategic tool across a fund’s life, not just an end-of-life solution.

The volume data support that. Jefferies counted $115 billion of GP-led secondaries in 2025, up 53% and 48% of all secondary activity, with CVs the majority structure. Growth continued into 2026. Jefferies put H1 2026 GP-led volume at $62 billion, against $47 billion a year earlier, for 53% of the market. Evercore’s count is $65 billion, up 35%. Single-asset CVs, the trophy-asset deals where conflicts are sharpest, reached $34 billion in Evercore’s data, up 88%.

The tool is also leaving buyout. Evercore attributes 16% of H1 2026 GP-led volume to infrastructure and 11% to credit. That helps explain why ILPA, which wrote this guidance for closed-end PE funds, flags that it may apply in other asset classes.

Europe is a smaller but fast-growing share of the market. William Blair’s survey put European GP-led mandates at $31 billion in 2025. Ropes & Gray puts European GP-led volume at about $15 billion in H1 2026, 24% of the global total, and projects close to $35 billion for the full year. Those two figures come from different sources, so the comparison is indicative. By Preqin’s count, 40 continuation funds closed in Europe in 2025, up from five in 2018.

Why LPs are the point

The governance problem sits with existing LPs. In a CV the GP sets the price for both sides: it sells the asset on behalf of the old fund’s LPs and buys it on behalf of the new vehicle it will manage. The LPs bear the cost if that price is too low.

Most LPs sell. GCM Grosvenor puts the average LP rollover rate in 2025 at about 15%. For most existing investors, then, a CV is an exit at a price set by a conflicted party. The minority who roll face a different problem. Many have to treat the roll as a new investment requiring underwriting and investment committee approval inside an election window measured in weeks. That is why the election period was one of the most contested provisions.

The stakes for LPs also run beyond any single deal. With exits slow, CVs have become a meaningful source of distributions. Morgan Lewis estimates they will account for at least a fifth of private market distributions in 2026. ILPA’s guidance also notes that how LPs are treated in a CV can shape whether they re-up with the same GP. ILPA’s members, more than 600 organizations representing over $3 trillion of PE assets, are the sellers in these deals and the commitment base for the next fund.

Some LPs have stopped relying on guidance alone. The sovereign wealth fund suit filed in Delaware in December 2025 shows the dispute route is open. LPs at September’s IPEM Global described applying investment-committee-grade scrutiny to CV processes. The final guidance arrives with that pressure already in the market.

What changed between June and October

Election periods: back to 20 days

The draft wanted at least 30 business days for LP elections, per Mayer Brown. The final settles on 20 “clear” business days, which is the 2023 level. ILPA now echoes the buyer-side argument: longer windows let valuations go stale and invite MAC clauses, price adjustments and holdbacks. For complex multi-asset deals, its answer is that LPs should speed up their own approvals and write longer windows into side letters.

Remain in place: from option to exception

This is the biggest reversal. The draft listed remain in place among five options GPs had to offer or explain away. The final allows it “only where” it doesn’t hurt pricing, governance or the rest of the fund. A new appendix argues against it. It cites weaker bids, a minority stake that has to be sold later (probably to the CV itself) and two LP pools with diverging interests in one fund.

A strip sale, or a “remain in place” structure, “is liquidity, not an exit.”

ILPA, Continuation Vehicles guidance, October 2026

ILPA keeps the economic protection, since rolling LPs must be no worse off, but drops the structural one. That matters for the Delaware sovereign wealth fund suit (C.A. No. 2025-1389-NAC). Per Mayer Brown’s summary of the complaint, it alleged rollers had no option to stay on existing economics. The no-worse-off test answers that complaint. An LP that wants to stay in the old fund gets no support.

Carry and bids

Our October 9 super carry piece asked whether final-round bid disclosure would survive. It did, with a caveat. GPs must still share bids received, pricing, bidder profiles and the reason for choosing the winner, but now “subject to binding confidentiality limitations and reasonable commercial sensitivities.” Conflicts such as a bidder backing the GP’s flagship fund must be disclosed.

Carry rollover dropped from 100% in the draft to a “significant and meaningful portion,” net of tax. For European whole-of-fund waterfalls, only carry tied to the CV assets should be rolled. Super carry survives. ILPA calls waterfall resets longstanding practice outside the US, including premium carry of 30%, as long as rolling LPs end up no worse off.

What got tougher

The economics test got tougher. Rolling LPs’ fees are compared across all fund-level costs, and their carry on a blended, risk-adjusted basis. Carry can’t be crystallized for rollers. GPs must also show their own economics with and without the CV.

The test is “whether the GP is better off with the CV than without it.”

ILPA, Continuation Vehicles guidance, October 2026

The final also bars rolls conditional on commitments to other GP funds and treats LPs who don’t respond as sellers. It requires the CV to fund the full purchase price. Mayer Brown’s draft summary doesn’t mention these provisions, so they may or may not be new.

Long story short

The draft set minimums for the whole market. The final leaves LPs to win the specifics themselves in side letters and LPAs, including longer election windows, mirror reporting and disclosure templates. Large allocators can negotiate that. Smaller LPs will have to rely on a standard that is firm on economics and flexible on process. The next test is credit, where multi-asset CVs are far more common than in the buyout funds this guidance was written for.

What the quarter also shows is a gap between the platform’s momentum and the 2026 milestones Tikehau set in February. A partner with capital and distribution is one way to close it.

Credit secondaries moves to an evergreen format

The most significant secondaries disclosure in the release is structural. Tikehau held the first close of the third iteration of its Credit Secondaries strategy, and unlike its two predecessors, it is structured as an evergreen, semi-liquid vehicle. A Korean institutional investor anchors it. Tikehau describes the mandate as capturing opportunities across the full spectrum of credit secondaries throughout the cycle.

The franchise has scaled quickly. Tikehau entered credit secondaries in 2019, and in February 2026 it closed Tikehau Private Debt Secondaries II on more than $1bn, above its $750m target and more than double the size of the first vintage. Moving the third iteration into a perpetual structure changes the economics of the business: capital stays invested and compounds rather than being returned at the end of a fund life, and fundraising becomes continuous rather than cyclical.

The format also fits the strategy Tikehau laid out at its February 2026 strategic update, which named semi-liquid vehicles among the tools for widening private wealth access to its products. The Korean anchor fits the distribution story too. In H1 2026, roughly 60% of Tikehau’s third-party net new money came from investors in Germany, Israel, South Korea and the US.

The release does not disclose the size of the first close, a target, or the vehicle’s liquidity terms. We will report those when Tikehau publishes them.

DEPLOYMENT PICKED UP WITH VOLATILITY

Tikehau said deployment in Credit Secondaries accelerated in Q3, as market volatility created more opportunities at attractive entry points and better valuations. The marquee deal: Tikehau acted as lead investor in a ~$215m GP-led secondary across a portfolio of performing US first-lien loans.

Two details stand out. First, this is a GP-led transaction. Earlier in 2026, Tikehau’s head of private debt secondaries, Pierpaolo Casamento, described TPDS II’s focus to Mergermarket as LP-led credit secondaries, even as the wider market pivoted toward GP-leds. Leading a GP-led deal of this size shows the team now competes on both sides of the market. Second, the underlying loans are performing. The transaction is a portfolio management tool, not a distress trade.

“Real Assets and Credit Secondaries continued to gain momentum, and our deployment remains disciplined in a market that rewards selectivity.”

Antoine Flamarion and Mathieu Chabran, co-founders of Tikehau, Q3 2026 release

That the founders single out Credit Secondaries in a two-strategy shortlist matters. In a quarter where group-level fundraising slowed, it is one of the two lines management chose to highlight as growing.

The partner search: what is new and what was already on record

According to Bloomberg’s October 20 report, which cited people familiar with the matter, Tikehau has held talks with several international firms and investors about selling a stake in itself and has mandated an investment bank to run a process that has been underway for several months. Tikehau declined to comment to Bloomberg, and the Q3 release does not address it.

The direction itself is not new. Tikehau has been laying the groundwork in public all year:

_{Sources: Tikehau Capital press releases of February 19, April 23 and October 22, 2026; Bloomberg, October 20, 2026.}

Bloomberg places the move within a wider trend of asset managers seeking strategic backers for capital, distribution and acquisition firepower. It notes that Wendel hired advisers last month to find partners for its private asset platform, and names Blue Owl, Blackstone and Goldman Sachs’ Petershill Partners among the most active buyers of stakes in alternative managers. Tikehau’s existing backers include its founders, who retain control, MACSF and Temasek.

Why scale is the question

In February, Tikehau reset its 2026 milestones to reflect a tougher macro and geopolitical backdrop. The Q3 update shows the fee business tracking the lower end of that range, while the portfolio-driven targets have slipped.

_{Sources: Tikehau Capital strategic update (February 19, 2026) and Q3 2026 release. AuM guidance assumes constant AuM in Capital Markets Strategies.}

The distinction matters. Tikehau attributes the net income and ROE shortfall to portfolio revenues, in particular unrealized marks on its €4.0bn balance sheet, rather than to the fee-paying business. Fee-paying AuM rose 6% year on year at constant perimeter to €42.5bn.

Fundraising is where a strategic partner would make the clearest difference. Net new money for the first nine months fell 58% year on year, with Private Equity down the most:

A strong quarter for liquidity

On the realization side, the quarter delivered. Tikehau returned €2.2bn to LPs year to date, including €1.1bn in Q3, its highest quarter of the year, driven by exits and by Credit and Infrastructure funds entering their post-investment phase. Highlights:

• Aubert & Duval exited from the Aerospace & Defense strategy for ~€260m.

• The third Direct Lending vintage was fully liquidated: launched in December 2014, 31 companies, 9.4% gross and 8.1% net IRR.

• Five Private Equity exits year to date at an average 1.7x gross MOIC, with three more signed exits expected to close in Q4.

• On the balance sheet, the Schroders exit returned €369m, at 1.65x gross MOIC and a 64% gross IRR.

Q3 distributions of €1,126m exceeded net new money of €459m. For LPs focused on DPI, that is a good result. For a manager measured on AuM growth, it raises the bar on fundraising, which is exactly where scale and distribution from a partner would help.

One reminder of Tikehau’s own history with GP-leds: the 77% drop in Private Equity deployment year to date partly reflects a high base. Q3 2025 included the ~€775m Egis investment, made through Tikehau’s first private equity continuation fund.

Orszag described sponsor M&A as stuck between two forces. Portfolio company owners are still holding out for better valuations, and higher rates make that gap harder to close. On the other side, LPs keep pushing for cash and liquidity events. Until one force wins, sponsor exits stay thin. He then made the point that matters for this market:

“While we’re all waiting for Godot a little bit on that private equity M&A moment, it is helping to drive additional activity in our secondaries business.”

Peter Orszag, CEO and Chairman, Lazard, Q3 2026 earnings call

That is the strategic logic of Lazard CL in a single sentence. The same valuation gap that keeps sponsor sales on hold sends GPs toward continuation vehicles and LPs toward portfolio sales. Lazard has built a franchise that earns fees on both sides of that seesaw. If sponsor M&A recovers, the M&A bankers benefit. If it does not, the secondaries team does.

Orszag said the effect is sharpest in software. There, he said, the gap between owners’ expectations and what buyers will pay has widened more than elsewhere over the past year, and the rise in rates makes it worse. Software-heavy buyout portfolios are exactly where we would expect GP-led supply to keep building into 2027.

Lazard CL: what changed since April

The Campbell Lutyens acquisition was announced on April 30. The Q3 materials add several new data points to the restated deal terms:

The $190B+ figure is capital raised through fund placement. It is not secondaries transaction volume and should not be compared with secondary volume league tables.

Accretion before synergies matters because synergies are where the deal thesis lives. On costs, Orszag pointed to early savings in real estate, vendors and IT. On revenue, he described referrals running in both directions: from Lazard CL to the M&A bankers, and from Lazard’s private capital coverage into fundraising mandates.

“So there is a flywheel or circularity there that’s very positive.”

Peter Orszag, Q3 2026 earnings call

He also gave a benchmark. Campbell Lutyens previously ran a joint venture with another investment bank that produced what Orszag called a notable level of M&A referrals. Lazard did not include those referrals in its deal underwriting. It nonetheless expects to “at least match and in all likelihood significantly beat that level of M&A referrals.” In practice, this is upside that has been left out of the base case. It does not appear in the ~$500M guide.

Private capital is now half the advisory story

Asked about large-cap M&A, Orszag used two numbers to show that Lazard is now covering both large-cap strategic deals and private capital. Its year-to-date league table position is its best in over a decade, and private capital is taking a record share of advisory revenue:

“In the third quarter, our share of revenue coming from private capital is at an all-time high.”

Peter Orszag, Q3 2026 earnings call

Once Campbell Lutyens closes, that share moves to roughly half of Financial Advisory revenue. Lazard set that level as a 2030 goal and will reach it about four years early. For a firm built on large-cap, board-level M&A, this changes its identity. Private capital, including secondaries, now accounts for half of its advisory business.

The headline numbers support the narrative but do not prove it yet. Financial Advisory adjusted net revenue was a Q3 record at $465M, up 10% year over year, but the nine-month total is down 1% at $1,266M. Firm-wide, the adjusted compensation ratio stayed at 69.9%, well above the 60% target. Q3 advisory revenue was split roughly 61% M&A and 39% non-M&A, per the call. Lazard says its probability-weighted 2027 pipeline is slightly more than double where its 2026 pipeline stood a year ago.

What we’re watching

Three things will show whether the hedge works.

Segment disclosure. Lazard currently reports no standalone secondaries revenue, no secondaries transaction volume and no separate Campbell Lutyens figures. Lazard CL becomes the firm’s third global business unit at closing. Whether it is reported as a separate segment with its own revenue line will determine whether investors can check the ~$500M guide and the referral thesis.

Integration and retention. Secondaries advisory depends on a small number of senior bankers who move between firms. “Ahead of plan” before closing is encouraging. The real test is the first full year inside a listed, compensation-ratio-focused parent. Separately, Lazard is reviewing its deferral policy and may shift more pay into cash.

The Godot timing. If sponsor M&A reopens in 2027, as Lazard’s pipeline suggests it might, some GP-led supply will shift back to traditional exits. Lazard’s bet is that it does not need to predict when that happens. That holds only if both desks are fully staffed when it does.

_{Source: Blackstone Q3 2026 earnings presentation, p. 18. Year-over-year changes calculated by Secondary Scoop.}

The crossover was not part of Blackstone’s narrative on the call. Walking through the $7.3bn receivable, CFO Michael Chae highlighted two pools: corporate private equity, of which he said nearly one-third is public and liquid, and the private equity energy business, which he said had more than doubled year over year. Secondaries went unmentioned.

Not just a harvest

The obvious reading is that buyout carry is converting to cash. Private Equity realizations were $9.8bn in the quarter, with Recognition Music Group, Ennovi and SP.LINKS named among the exits. That is part of it, but the arithmetic says it is not the whole story.

BCP Global’s NAPR fell $606m quarter over quarter. Across the entire Private Equity segment, net realized distributions were only $325m, offset by $112m of net performance revenues. Even if every dollar of PE distributions came out of BCP Global, it would explain roughly half of the decline. The remainder implies a reduction in accrued carry from performance in BCP Global, which the deck does not break out at the fund level. Firm-wide, GAAP unrealized performance allocations were negative $627m in the quarter.

Secondaries moved the other way, adding $48m quarter over quarter. And the cash side of the quarter was soft: total segment net realizations fell 34% year over year to $332m. Chae noted on the call that the firm had guided to a sequential decline, and net realizations came in down 20% quarter over quarter.

Will the lead hold? The Q&A points to a test in Q4

Asked by TD’s Bill Katz where fourth-quarter realizations would come from, Chae pointed to closings on previously announced sales, primarily in private equity, and gave an unusually concrete marker:

“What we have under contract that is expected to close in terms of carry realizations alone in the fourth quarter is expected to surpass the total net realization levels for the firm from the third quarter.”Michael Chae, CFO, responding to an analyst question on the Q3 2026 earnings call

Q3 net realizations were $332m. If a meaningful share of the Q4 carry comes out of BCP Global, the gap between buyout and secondaries carry could widen further. That is a possibility, not a forecast: the call did not attribute the Q4 realizations by fund, and new marks can rebuild accrued carry as fast as exits drain it. What it does confirm is the dynamic behind the crossover. Blackstone’s buyout carry is in harvest mode; its secondaries carry is not yet.

Read the 4.3% with the calendar in mind

Secondaries appreciated 4.3% in the quarter, ahead of Corporate Private Equity at 2.8% and Tactical Opportunities at 2.2%. On a twelve-month basis the order flips: Secondaries is up 9.3% against 14.7% for Corporate Private Equity.

The quarterly comparison is not like for like. Strategic Partners reports on a three-month lag from fund financial statements, so the Q3 print largely captures second-quarter marks. In its notes, Blackstone says current market activity is expected to affect reported results in upcoming quarters. Third-quarter volatility, including the rate move that hit opportunistic real estate, will show up in Strategic Partners’ numbers in Q4.

SP X: $16bn raised, at least $22bn targeted

The clearest new secondaries disclosure came in President Jon Gray’s prepared remarks. Blackstone held additional closings for its new private equity flagship secondaries vehicle, Strategic Partners X, and for its real estate secondaries vehicle, with the flagship at:

“Over $16 billion raised to date toward a target of at least $22 billion.”Jon Gray, President and COO, Q3 2026 earnings call

That is up from the $11bn Gray cited on the Q1 call, and it is the first time we have seen a stated target for the fund in our coverage. At $22bn, SP X would roughly match the $22.2bn Bloomberg reported for SP VIII. The deck shows SP X at $12.35bn of committed capital as of September 30. Blackstone does not reconcile the two figures; post-quarter closings or a broader definition of capital raised are both plausible, so we treat them as separate measures.

The Q&A filled in the economics. BMO’s Brennan Hawken asked whether the firm’s guidance for double-digit growth in base management fees in 2027 included catch-up fees from the newly activated secondaries flagship. Chae said the guidance refers to full-year base management fees against full-year 2026, inclusive of all drivers. In other words, SP X catch-up fees are inside the guidance, not on top of it. Earlier, Chae listed finishing the SP X fundraise among the drivers whose management fees will build through the first half of 2027.

Capital keeps arriving; deployment slowed

Secondaries took in $3.1bn of inflows in Q3 and $25.1bn over the last twelve months, 32% of Private Equity’s $77.8bn. Only Corporate Private Equity, at $34.9bn, raised more within the segment.

Deployment went the other way. Secondaries put $1.95bn to work in Q3, against $13.2bn over twelve months, implying an average of about $3.8bn in each of the three prior quarters. Q3 ran at roughly half that pace, with SP X holding $7.79bn of available capital. Neither the deck nor the call addressed it. Secondaries deployment is lumpy and one quarter is not a trend, but a slowdown in the middle of the largest fundraise in the program’s history is worth watching.

Where the value sits

_{Source: Blackstone Q3 2026 earnings presentation, p. 20. Values, MOICs and IRRs are reported on a three-month lag; committed and available capital are as of Q3. Year is the start of the investment period. Realized share is realized value divided by total value, calculated by Secondary Scoop; Blackstone treats Strategic Partners realizations as returns of capital until fully recovered and does not report realized MOICs. Selected funds shown; the total includes all Strategic Partners vehicles.}

Strategic Partners IX is the fund to watch. It holds $19.9bn of unrealized value, its investment period ended in March 2026, and only about 6% of its total value has been realized. SP VII and SP VIII, by contrast, have returned the majority of their value. Blackstone does not allocate NAPR by fund, so we cannot confirm how much of the Secondaries carry pool sits in SP IX. But the path from accrued to realized secondaries carry runs through it.

Two smaller data points. SP VIII’s net IRR is 17% in the Q3 deck; Bloomberg reported 18% as of March. And Strategic Partners GP Solutions, with $2.1bn committed and an investment period running to December 2026, sits at 1.1x and a 1% net IRR, the weakest line in the program.

The mandate is unchanged in its essentials: global, mid-market, buyout-focused, blended across LP-led and GP-led transactions, and diversified by vintage, GP and geography. The pitch is access to “hard-to-access GPs” through relationships built on Pantheon’s primary and co-investment business.

“The depth of our GP relationships and access to extensive data across private equity funds and companies amassed over decades enables us to have conviction and be disciplined about the assets we buy and the partners we back, particularly in the mid-market where access and selection matters most. We enter this next phase with strong conviction in our ability to keep identifying compelling opportunities for our investors.”

-Amyn Hassanally, Partner and Global Head of Private Equity Secondaries, Pantheon

Taken alone, the close is a strong fundraise. Taken with everything Pantheon has shipped since November 2023, it reads as the moment the platform’s center of gravity visibly moved to secondaries.

How the machine was built

Pantheon is a multi-strategy house, not a secondaries specialist. It still runs primaries and co-investments. But in the past three years, each asset-class team has raised a record secondaries program, and the firm has wrapped those programs in structures aimed at buyers it did not previously reach.

_{Sources: Pantheon press releases; Secondaries Investor (PGSF VI, PGSF VII target); IREI and Crain Currency (PGIF IV target). *See disclosures. n/d = not disclosed in sources reviewed.}

The full secondaries strategy

Private equity secondaries: the original engine

The oldest franchise, goes back to 1988. The edge Pantheon sells is information: decades of primary commitments give it data on funds and companies before they trade. During the PGSF VII raise, Secondaries Investor reported the fund would mainly buy into funds run by North American and European managers where Pantheon already held primary commitments, targeting a 15% to 18% net IRR and a 1.5x to 1.7x net multiple. Terms for PGSF VIII have not been made public. The franchise managed $13.5bn as of May 2026, before today’s final close.

Infrastructure secondaries: the first-mover claim

Pantheon raised its first fund including infrastructure secondaries in 2010 and had invested roughly $7.6bn in the segment by early 2024. PGIF IV was 75% deployed at final close, with more than 90% of capital committed to LP portfolio and GP-initiated deals. On the GP-led side, Secondaries Investor reported on October 2 that Pantheon backed Meridiam’s $4bn-plus infrastructure continuation vehicle alongside Ares and GIC.

“As true infrastructure investors—not generalists—we’re scaling with precision…”

Andrea Echberg, global head of infrastructure, Pantheon (April 2026)

Private credit secondaries: the fastest-scaling line

A dedicated strategy since 2018. The third generation of senior (PSD III) and opportunistic (PCO III) programs reached $8.3bn in aggregate; PCO III alone was nearly 4x its $590m predecessor. Pantheon has positioned the strategy for insurers on capital efficiency. It also shows up repeatedly on the buy side of the GP-recycling credit deals we have tracked, including Goldman Sachs’ €1.4bn credit vehicle backed by Pantheon and Temasek.

“Private credit secondaries are entering a new phase of maturity and growth…”

Rakesh (Rick) Jain, global head of private credit, Pantheon (July 2025)

Structured access: the CFO

The May 2026 CFO, arranged with Evercore, packaged exposure to the flagship PE secondaries and co-investment strategies plus a seeded portfolio into a rated structure, closing at $1bn against a $750m target with insurers among the buyers. Bloomberg placed it alongside similar structures from Neuberger Berman, Vista, Dawson and Carlyle AlpInvest. For Pantheon it opened a capital-efficient route into its secondaries strategy for balance-sheet investors.

Wealth access: the evergreen suite

Internationally, Pantheon now runs evergreen vehicles across all three secondaries asset classes: Pantheon Global Private Equity (PGPE), Pantheon Global Credit Secondaries (PGCS) and Pantheon Global Infrastructure Secondaries (PGIS). In the US, the AMG Pantheon funds cover private equity, credit and infrastructure. The firm sized the whole evergreen and listed platform at about $15bn in April 2026, including Pantheon International Plc and Pantheon Infrastructure Plc.

Distribution: the Gulf and Asia

The newest gear. Pantheon opened its first ADGM office in September and hired Firas Mallah from Sagard to lead Middle East capital formation, which we covered on September 30. Today’s release names new LPs from Asia and the Middle East as a distinguishing feature of PGSF VIII, without naming or sizing them. The timing suggests the office was opened with this fundraise already in motion rather than to start it.

Company profile

Where this sits in the market

A $6bn close is not mega-fund territory. CVC Secondary Partners closed SOF VI at $10bn in September, and the largest flagships run well above that. But Pantheon has deliberately positioned below the mega-funds, and its step from $3.25bn to $6bn in one vintage is steeper than CVC’s move from $5.8bn to $10bn. What sets Pantheon apart in the platform-versus-specialist debate is breadth rather than size: few managers run institutional and evergreen secondaries programs across PE, infrastructure and credit at once. The next vintage will show whether the sourcing advantage that built the machine survives the scale it has produced.

Congrats to Naveen Nataraj, but here at Secondary Scoop, we want to focus on Nigel Dawn becoming co-president of Evercore and chairman of Private Capital Advisory (PCA), the secondaries business he founded.

The detail that matters most is easy to miss. Evercore has not had a president since Ralph Schlosstein, who held the title alongside the CEO role from 2009 until he became co-CEO with Weinberg in July 2020. Weinberg has run the firm alone as chairman and CEO since February 2022. The firm is reviving a title that has been vacant for six years and splitting it between a corporate M&A banker and the person who built its secondaries franchise.

“Evercore is a different firm today, even compared with three years ago.”

Roger C. Altman, founder and senior chairman, Evercore

From lift-out to leadership

Evercore announced PCA in 2013, hiring Dawn and Nicolas Lanel from UBS, where Dawn had founded and led the bank’s secondary advisory business. The unit was originally structured with Evercore as majority owner and its key principals, including Dawn and Lanel, holding a minority stake. Today PCA has teams in the United States, Europe and Singapore, and Evercore describes it as the market-leading business in its space.

The market around it has changed shape. By Evercore’s own count, secondary volume hit a record $226 billion in 2025, with LP-led deals at $120 billion and GP-led deals at $106 billion. The first half of 2026 set another record at $121 billion. In a Bloomberg TV interview in August, Dawn said the full year could reach $250 billion. He attributed the growth to a structural shift: the largest LPs are using the secondary market to generate liquidity while private equity portfolios fail to produce expected distributions.

When a founder of a niche product gets one of the two most senior jobs below the CEO, the product has stopped being niche.

What the appointment tells us about secondaries

Secondaries advisory is now a top-of-house business. For most of the last decade, secondaries advisory sat next to fund placement as a specialist desk inside larger banks. Evercore ranked third globally by advisory fees among public firms for the second consecutive year in 2025. A firm of that size putting its PCA founder into the co-presidency tells you how management views the fee pool: durable and structural, not a cyclical substitute for missing exits. That matches the thesis this publication has argued from the start. Secondaries are becoming a standing portfolio management tool, not a distress valve.

Sponsor coverage and secondaries are converging. Evercore has said so directly. On the Q2 2026 earnings call, Weinberg described the firm’s work integrating the two:

“We’ve continued to invest in bringing together our private capital advisory businesses and our classic sponsor M&A business, and we’re seeing some real fruits to that labor.”

John S. Weinberg, chairman and CEO, Q2 2026 earnings call

The talent war moves up a level. Evercore added a PCA senior managing director in each of the first two quarters of 2026, alongside an addition to its Asia PCA team, and recently brought in Clay McCoy after his garden leave from Campbell Lutyens. Competitors are building just as hard, but often by buying. Weinberg said in April that strategic acquisitions face a very high bar and that hiring and platform expansion take priority. Evercore is betting on growing its franchise from inside while the rest of the advisory layer consolidates.

_{Selected independent advisers. Sources: company announcements and prior Secondary Scoop coverage.}

Evercore’s bet, in numbers, and the number it won’t give

The broader strategy is diversification away from pure M&A. Advisory fees rose to $3.27 billion in 2025 from $2.44 billion in 2024. On the Q2 2026 call, Evercore said non-M&A businesses contributed more than 40% of revenue over the prior 12 months. Its investment banking bench stood at 188 senior managing directors at the end of June.

That 40% is not a secondaries number. It combines underwriting, equities commissions and wealth management fees with the non-M&A parts of advisory: restructuring, capital markets advisory, the Private Funds Group and PCA. Evercore does not disclose PCA’s revenue, and Secondary Scoop could not derive PCA’s share of firm revenue from public filings. The only market-share indicator in the public record is a 2024 podcast description stating that Evercore was involved in roughly 30–40% of secondaries activity. That is not an audited figure, and it predates the market’s last two record years.

The tone of the earnings calls is worth tracking too. In Q1 2026, PCA delivered a record first quarter. In Q2, Evercore described it as delivering “another strong quarter,” while other units, including the Private Funds Group, posted records. The market itself set a first-half record, so this is not a sign of weakness. Asked about PCA on the Q2 call, Weinberg said:

“Our PCA business is actually performing well, and we feel really good about the prospects going forward.”

John S. Weinberg, Q2 2026 earnings call

The open question: who runs PCA?

The announcement does not name a new global head of PCA. Dawn becomes chairman of the business and, in Evercore’s words, will “remain closely connected” to it and its clients. In a market where advisers are hiring each other’s senior bankers, the day-to-day leadership of the largest franchise is the question clients and competitors will ask first.

The first chance to hear more is Evercore’s Q3 2026 results on October 28. We will be listening for four things:

• Whether a successor, or a co-head structure, has been decided for PCA.

• How PCA performed in Q3, a quarter that followed a record first half for market volume.

• How the PCA and sponsor M&A integration will be organized under the co-presidents.

• Any update on PCA’s build-out in Europe and Asia.

The figure carries a footnote, and the footnote is two words long: “Internal estimate.” Every other ranking on the same run of slides is sourced to Dealogic. The CV number is the exception.

Where the number sits

Jefferies did not file CV advisory under a secondaries heading. It placed the 20%+ figure inside its “Large-Cap Private Equity M&A” pillar, one of four pillars the bank says its investment banking franchise is now built on. The other stat on that slide is a #3 ranking in PE M&A over $1 billion. Jefferies is presenting CV advisory to shareholders as part of its core sponsor business, sitting alongside sell-side M&A as another exit route it can run for the same clients.

_{Source: Jefferies 2026 Investor Meeting presentation, slides 28–31 and endnotes (slides 61–62).}

A note on terms: the M&A rankings on slides 28 and 29 cover sponsor exits sold to other buyers, including secondary buyouts. They are not secondaries-market data and should not be read as part of the CV claim.

Does the math hold?

Jefferies’ own market reviews give us a denominator. Its February 2026 review put 2025 GP-led volume at $115 billion. Its July 2026 review put H1 2026 GP-led volume at $62 billion and sized CVs at 89% of GP-led volume in both periods. Applying the 20% floor to those figures gives the implied volume Jefferies would need to have advised.

_{Secondary Scoop calculation from Jefferies Global Secondary Market Review data (February and July 2026). Assumes the share is measured by volume, which the deck does not state.}

The one hard number Jefferies has published on its own activity is consistent with that. The July review states that its Secondary Advisory team advised on $30 billion of secondary volume in H1 2026, about a quarter of the $118 billion market. That figure combines LP-led and GP-led work, so it cannot isolate CVs. But it leaves ample room for $11 billion or more of CV mandates in the half.

The denominator also holds up outside Jefferies. Lazard’s 2025 report put GP-led volume at $116 billion, within a billion of Jefferies’ count. Lazard’s interim 2026 report is slightly less generous on structure, putting CVs at 84% of first-half GP-led deployment versus Jefferies’ 89%. A smaller CV pool would make a given amount of Jefferies activity look like a larger share, so that difference does not undercut the claim.

“CVs have become a mainstream exit mechanism.”

Jefferies, Global Secondary Market Review, July 2026

Why it matters to a bank’s shareholders

The more interesting question is why Jefferies chose to put the number in front of equity investors at all. The July review gives part of the answer: 82 of the top 100 sponsors by AUM have now executed a CV, and GP-led transactions accounted for 14% of sponsor-backed exit volume. For a bank whose investment banking business was, by its own description on slide 27, historically weighted toward sponsors, a CV is now a standard product to sell the same client base.

It also helps explain the shape of Jefferies’ sponsor franchise. A bank that ranks #2 in mid-market sell-side PE M&A and advises on a fifth of CVs is positioned on both exit routes a sponsor weighs for a mature asset: sell it, or roll it. Jefferies does not break out secondaries advisory revenue, so the deck offers no way to size what that is worth inside its $2.7 billion of LTM advisory revenue.

A crowded field with no scoreboard

Jefferies is not the only advisor claiming the lead. Evercore’s H1 2026 review describes its private capital advisory group as “the world’s leading secondaries advisory business,” without publishing a share or advised-volume figure of its own. Evercore also counts a slightly larger market than Jefferies: $121 billion of H1 2026 volume and $65 billion GP-led, against Jefferies’ $118 billion and $62 billion, so the same deal book converts into a different share depending on whose total is used. Behind those two sit Lazard, which agreed in April to acquire Campbell Lutyens and expects to close in 2026; PJT Park Hill; Houlihan Lokey; and dedicated GP-led teams at Morgan Stanley, UBS, Rothschild & Co and Moelis, with Raymond James, Baird and William Blair active in the mid-market. None of them publishes a CV share on a comparable basis.

That gap is built into how the market is measured. Market sizing in secondaries comes from the advisors who run the deals: Jefferies, Lazard and Evercore publish the reports the rest of the market cites, and each builds them partly from its own deal flow. That is how a fragmented private market gets measured at all. It also means a share claim like this one cannot be independently checked from public data, and readers should treat it as a well-informed self-assessment rather than a league table.

The claim does not need to be exact to be meaningful. Even at a share in the mid-teens, Jefferies would be among the two or three dominant CV advisors at a time when the advisory field is consolidating. A rival publishing a competing figure, measured on the same basis, would be the most useful next data point.

The close, briefly

The terms were set in January and confirmed at closing on August 31, so we only recap them here. EQT paid a $3.2bn base consideration, mostly in about 80.4 million EQT shares, with up to $500m of cash earn-out tied to Coller’s performance through March 2029. EQT also took 10% of the carry in Coller International Partners IX (CIP IX) and the right to invest in 35% of the carry in future closed-end Coller funds. Jeremy Coller stays on as Head and CIO of the renamed Coller EQT and joins EQT’s Executive Committee. EQT has committed to doubling Coller’s FAUM within four years.

What’s new is how the business now looks inside EQT’s accounts. Yesterday, EQT reported Secondaries as a fourth operating segment next to Private Capital, Infrastructure and Real Estate. Coller brought 323 FTEs and €34bn of fee-paying AUM into the group. Of EQT’s €10.9bn of net inflows to key funds in the quarter, €10.3bn came from adding Coller. Of the €24.4bn of net inflows to other strategies, €19.0bn did.

The restatement: same fees, smaller base

The most technical disclosure may be the one LPs and analysts ask about most. Coller EQT ended Q3 with $38bn of fee-paying AUM on its own methodology. On EQT’s methodology the figure is $33bn. From Q4, Coller EQT will report on EQT’s basis, and the year-end FAUM guidance for the segment drops from $40bn to $35bn.

The fund pipeline

CIP IX, Coller’s latest private equity secondaries flagship, now counts as one of EQT’s key funds. EQT says it is “performing on plan” and was 75–80% invested as of October 15. On the call, management put it at about $10bn of fee-generating commitments. Coller EQT is preparing to launch CIP X early next year.

On credit, Coller EQT has launched fundraising for CCO III, the third vintage of its credit secondaries series. The fund charges fees on invested capital and has not been activated yet, so it adds nothing to fee-paying AUM for now.

This matters because credit secondaries are EQT’s only route back into credit. EQT sold its credit business in 2020. Asked whether it now needs a primary lending platform, CEO Per Franzén said no.

“Given the growth opportunity that we see ahead also in the insurance segment, we don’t see a need for us to add a primary credit platform in order to be able to capture that opportunity.”, Per Franzén, CEO, EQT · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

Insurance is where Coller looks least like the rest of EQT

In Q3, Coller EQT raised $2.7bn for its funds and vehicles through structured insurance products. On the call, management said insurers account for close to 25% of Coller EQT’s client commitments, compared with less than 10% for EQT overall, and that Coller has raised almost $9bn from insurance since 2024. EQT framed the opportunity as products that mix both sides of its platform.

“This is a core growth area for Coller EQT going forward, but also for EQT as a whole, given the possibility to create combined primary and secondary insurance solutions.”, EQT management · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

A new leg: infrastructure secondaries

This is the one strategic signal from the quarter that hadn’t appeared in any earlier EQT or Coller release. Coller’s nine strategies span private equity and credit secondaries. Infrastructure secondaries were not among them. Asked by Morgan Stanley about expansion into secondaries within infrastructure, EQT said it intends to build one.

“On the infra secondaries, this is a key opportunity for us. We’re fully focused on building this leg of the business. … First of all, we need to have the right people in order to run this. And that’s priority number one.”, EQT management · Q3 2026 webcast, October 15

EQT gave no timeline beyond noting it was “about 45 days in from the closing.” It will be entering a segment that has started to fill up. StepStone closed a $1.7bn infrastructure secondaries fund in August, and Hamilton Lane is in market with its third.

Distribution: two wealth deals before the close

Coller signed two European wealth partnerships in the quarter, both before it formally became part of EQT.

On July 1, it partnered with Italy’s Cherry Bank to offer its private credit secondaries strategies to the bank’s wealth clients. Boris Maeder, head of international private wealth distribution, called credit secondaries “a market segment that we believe remains under allocated for many investors.”

On August 11, it partnered with Titanbay to put Coller’s evergreen secondaries funds on Titanbay’s platform for European wealth managers. Titanbay’s TradeEngine handles subscriptions, redemptions and allocations. Titanbay co-CEO Michael Gruener: “Distributing an evergreen fund into the wealth channel is one of the hardest operational problems in private markets.”

Deal flow: venture, software and European services

Coller led or co-led three GP-led deals that became public during the period:

• Lightspeed “Project Mercury” (reported August 12). Bloomberg reported that Coller is lead buyer on a roughly $600m continuation process. The vehicle would move Lightspeed’s stakes in OpenAI, Verkada, Rippling, Reflection AI and Glean out of Select V, Opportunity II and a separately managed account, and add new primary capital for Anthropic. UBS is advising. Neither firm commented, and we have not seen a close announced.

• Carrick Capital / Saviynt (August 31). A roughly $600m single-asset continuation vehicle for the identity-security company, with Coller as lead and HSBC Asset Management as co-lead. Existing LPs could roll or sell at 11x gross (10x net) on Carrick’s original investment. Carrick committed $255m of new capital as part of Saviynt’s $700m Series B at about a $3bn valuation.

• EMK Capital / VDK (October 15, just after quarter-end). Coller EQT co-led a single-asset CV for VDK, a European technical installation services group of more than 150 businesses. Size was not disclosed. It is the first deal announced under the Coller EQT name. Partner Martin Fleischer said the deal shows “the role the secondaries market can play” in backing platforms through their next phase.

Q3 at a glance

There are some sponsors in the universe that are stuck on marks and marks that are just not going to come to pass

Ted Pick, Chairman and CEO, Morgan Stanley (3Q26 earnings call)

Pick tied the point to pricing discipline. Buyers, he said, are very sharp to what sits in sponsors' portfolios and to the new weighted average cost of capital regime, including country, supply-chain and AI risk. Some sponsors, he added, are holding on and hoping for better.

The positive answer names continuation funds

Pick opened with the view that at some point, the piper must be paid, meaning portfolios have to be harvested. He then listed what sponsors have done instead of selling: there's been, of course, a ton of engineering, continuation funds, the ability to put some assets in new funds.

He also gave the hold-longer case a fair hearing. Some private equity investors, he said, have decided they want to keep certain assets on their balance sheet because those businesses work at higher rates and can generate low to mid-double-digit IRRs with appropriate leverage.

He credited the leading firms with mixing exits, bringing some stuff that maybe doesn't have a higher mark, but it's ready for prime time to market alongside clear winners.

No rate rescue in the base case

The comments that matter most for pricing were about the macro backdrop. Pick called it a longer odds bet that the market gets a low-rate, low-inflation, non-recessionary environment, and said he would not bet on it. Sponsors waiting for that outcome to validate their marks are, in his framing, waiting on the less likely scenario.

He also revised his own call. Pick said he may have been mistaken a couple of years ago in expecting sponsors to lead the corporate finance cycle. Corporates are leading it instead, and sponsors have to hustle to keep up with the strategic bid.

Elsewhere on the call, he said that when higher rates reflect inflation or supply shocks rather than growth, investors become less excited about putting up illiquid risk capital.

September narrowed the window

The numbers show a quarter split in two. Management described July and August as brisk, before Middle East tensions and higher global rates slowed activity around Labor Day. Equity underwriting fell 19% year on year to $525m on lower IPOs and blocks, partially offset by follow-ons. Firm-wide investment banking revenue fell 11% from the second quarter. Wells Fargo's Mike Mayo referred to pulled IPOs in his question.

Advisory was the exception, up 30% to $887m on higher completed M&A in the Americas. That fits Pick's point that corporates, not sponsors, are setting the pace.

_{Source: Morgan Stanley 3Q26 earnings release and consolidated income statement. Percentage changes calculated by Secondary Scoop.}

Morgan Stanley took a mark of its own

Morgan Stanley Investment Management reported performance-based income and other revenue of $(106)m, against $117m a year earlier. The release attributes the swing to the reversal of accrued carried interest related primarily to certain investments in one of our private funds. On the call, management described it as related to two investments in a private fund. Neither names the fund or the assets. IM net revenue fell 12% to $1.5bn, and IM compensation fell on lower carry-related pay.

Where distributions go when they come

The wealth business shows the other end of the liquidity chain. Just over half of the record $232bn in net new assets was IPO-related. Management described how fund distributions after lockups expire, and stock received by investors such as endowments, move into Morgan Stanley advice accounts. Alternatives delivered another quarter of record sales in wealth, and Pick said parts of the firm's alternatives platform, in both product and pricing, aren't available to clients anywhere else.

When exits do happen, some of the proceeds go back into wealth channels, where semi-liquid private markets products are sold.

The 2026 Campbell Lutyens Asia Pacific Private Markets Report, built on CL’s proprietary deal data and a Q2–Q3 survey of 181 LPs, describes a sharp reversal. GP-led volume rebounded 112% to $5.9bn in 2025. This year, closed volume has already passed that full-year figure, and CL estimates a further $10.9bn of deals is currently in market. If those close before December 31, APAC GP-led volume reaches $16.8bn, more than two and a half times the 2022 peak.

The more interesting finding is what isn’t growing with it. On the LP-led side, APAC funds made up just 2% of global transaction volume in H1 2026, unchanged from 2025, and CL reports that several global LPs explored sales of APAC-centric portfolios this year before abandoning them over bid-ask spreads.

The numbers, year by year

_{Source: Campbell Lutyens proprietary data. 2026 in-market infra/real assets figure combines $3.3bn infrastructure and $0.5bn real assets. Figures as charted by CL; totals subject to rounding.}

Infrastructure rebuilt the market. Private equity is scaling it.

The 2025 recovery was not evenly distributed. GP-led volume rose by $3.1bn, and infrastructure, which registered no GP-led volume in CL’s data for 2023 or 2024, contributed $2.0bn of that increase. Private equity still made up 67% of the year’s total, but the swing factor was infra.

Geographically, 2025 volume was concentrated in two markets: Australia and New Zealand accounted for 41% and Greater China for 27%, followed by India (13%) and Korea (11%). Single-asset continuation vehicles made up 58% of volume, multi-asset CVs 42%. CL highlighted five transactions:

The 2026 numbers point to PE taking over the growth. PE accounts for $4.9bn of closed volume and $7.1bn of the in-market pipeline. The jump in average deal size to $581m, close to 2023’s $583m and nearly double 2025’s $308m, is consistent with CL’s explanation: more megadeals and greater buyer willingness to underwrite them.

From exit route to fundraising engine

The report’s most useful contribution is its two advised case studies, because they show the GP-led as a tool for the next fund rather than the last one.

In the first, an ANZ infrastructure GP ran a A$2.1bn single-asset CV on a digital infrastructure asset in 2022, retaining a co-control stake. CL says stapled capital from the process amounted to roughly 40% of the GP’s new primary fund, which is targeting A$1.4bn against a predecessor of A$400m.

In the second, a Southeast Asian PE manager completed a $230m strip sale in education in 2025, consolidating multiple assets into one platform while returning partial liquidity to LPs. Its next fund targets $1.0bn, up from $890m. The figures match the Navis transaction in CL’s 2025 deal list.

Both new-fund figures are targets, not closes. But the pattern fits what the region’s GPs face: a backlog of maturing assets, LPs asking for DPI ahead of re-ups, and a fundraising market that, by CL’s own data, is rewarding a very small number of franchises.

What buyers are now demanding

The rebound has not loosened terms. CL’s survey describes buyers concentrating on high-quality sponsors and market-leading assets, and treating alignment mechanics as non-negotiable: a full rollover of carry plus either a GP commitment topped up to 5–10% of the vehicle or a co-investment from the flagship fund.

Buyer priorities also split by market. In developed Asia, buyers favor deals where the GP holds control over value creation and governance. In emerging Asia, the priority is a visible, achievable path to exit. That distinction maps onto where volume is clearing: ANZ, Korea and select China and India deals, with Southeast Asia at 4% of 2025 volume.

The LP-led side is still stuck

LP-led activity tells a different story. APAC-domiciled sellers accounted for 18% of global LP-led volume in 2025, a figure CL attributes partly to liquidity- and regulation-driven sales. That fell to 12% in H1 2026. Between 2021 and 2025, the bulk of the region’s LP-led selling came from Taiwanese LPs restructuring private markets books under regulatory pressure, activity CL says has since moderated.

The seller base is broadening, with LPs in China, Malaysia and Hong Kong trimming non-core and tail-end positions, but the larger developed markets remain thin. Japanese deal flow is sporadic and often routed through gatekeepers. Korean sellers face potential capital gains tax leakage. Australian volume remains below pre-COVID levels, though CL sees superannuation consolidation as a possible catalyst.

The more telling figure is on the asset side: APAC funds made up 2% of global LP-led volume in both 2025 and H1 2026. The aborted sales of APAC-centric portfolios this year suggest the constraint is price, not willingness. Buyers are paying for curated assets with a GP’s conviction behind them; they are not yet paying sellers’ prices for diversified APAC fund exposure.

Discounts as an entry ticket

Where the LP-led market does price APAC risk, it prices it steeply. CL, citing Reuters, puts discounts on secondary stakes in top-tier Chinese funds at 40–50%, and says select global secondary buyers are re-entering on the bet that markdowns are excessive for assets with near-term exit visibility. Hong Kong’s IPO rebound in 2025 gives that thesis a plausible exit channel.

The same logic appears elsewhere in the report. In India, 58% of LPs already investing in Indian secondaries said they want to increase exposure, according to CL data. In Southeast Asia, secondaries and co-investments are framed as a way into the region without a full fund-cycle commitment. In both cases, secondaries are functioning as a lower-commitment entry point to markets LPs are hesitant to back through primaries.

The first half was quiet by comparison. Q1 produced two closes worth €2.0bn: Montana Capital Partners’ MCP Opportunity Secondary Program VI and Arcano Secondary Fund V, the one Spanish manager on the list. Q2 produced two closes worth €532m combined. Q3 alone raised 7.4x as much as the first six months.

_{European secondaries fund closes by quarter, 2026 YTD. Source: PitchBook; quarterly sums by Secondary Scoop.}

Concentration at the top is just as sharp. CVC Secondary Partners’ Secondary Opportunities Fund VI accounts for 40% of the year’s total on its own. Add Clipway’s debut fund and two managers hold 66% of everything European secondaries vehicles have closed in 2026.

_{Source: PitchBook, "Secondaries funds closed YTD," geography Europe, as of September 30, 2026. Close dates and domicile as reported by PitchBook. *Netley says its fund reached final close in July and announced it on September 3; see sourcing notes. Debut labels per the managers' own announcements.}

Two of Q3’s five closes came from first-time managers

The same PitchBook report says European first-time PE fundraising has stalled at a series low of €1.5bn across seven funds, and that established firms took 88.5% of all European PE capital raised this year. Its explanation is that LPs short on distributions re-up with managers they already know.

Secondaries ran the other way in Q3. Clipway and Netley Capital, both debut funds and both London-based, raised €6.6bn between them, about 35% of the quarter’s secondaries capital. Clipway’s €5.6bn alone is nearly four times PitchBook’s figure for all first-time PE fundraising in Europe this year. PitchBook does not say how it classifies secondaries vehicles in its first-time count, but on these numbers they appear to sit outside it.

Neither manager is a first-time team in the usual sense. Clipway is run by managing partners Vincent Gombault, Ingmar Vallano and Benoit Verbrugghe and announced a final close of $6.4bn on July 21, which it calls the “largest-ever debut secondaries platform”. The fund drew 186 LPs and targets diversified LP-led deals in North American and Western European buyout funds. Netley is led by managing partner Caspar Berendsen. It launched in September 2025 with $315m and says its debut fund “was oversubscribed and closed at an extended hard cap”, taking total committed, deployable capital to about $1.2bn.

Location matters here too. By PitchBook’s domicile tags, the three UK funds account for €15.3bn, or 71% of European secondaries capital closed this year. That mirrors the deal side of the same report, where the UK & Ireland took 42.1% of European PE deal value in Q3 while France fell 38.7% quarter on quarter.

The backlog behind the bid

PitchBook’s exits section explains why buyers keep raising. Sponsors struck 2,253 new deals in Q3 against 435 exits, so portfolios are growing almost six times faster than they are being sold down. Distributions as a share of NAV have fallen below 20%, against a 10-year average of 27%.

The inventory numbers point the same way. Europe now has a record 14,803 PE-backed companies, and 11% of them have been held for more than nine years. The median holding period for companies that do sell fell to 6.7 years from 7.1 in 2025. PitchBook reads this as a split market: assets that can be sold are moving faster, and everything else is piling up. It names that backlog as the reason continuation vehicles and NAV-based deals are being used more often.

Q3’s single-asset CV closes fit that pattern. PitchBook cites vehicles from Bregal Unternehmerkapital, Exponent Private Equity and G Square Healthcare Private Equity, the last built around Pharmacy2U.

Big quarter, small slice

PitchBook adds a caveat to its own secondaries section. Secondaries took 12.6% of European private capital raised YTD and continuation funds took 3.2%, against 29.4% for traditional PE.

There is a second tension in the report. Its private capital by strategy chart shows 2026 secondaries fundraising well below the 2025 bar, which was the largest in the series. We are reading that from the chart rather than a stated figure, and there is a full quarter still to come. Even so, the 2026 story so far is one of concentration in a few large closes rather than broad growth in secondaries fundraising.

PISCES is becoming a VC secondaries venue

PitchBook also tracks the UK’s Private Intermittent Securities and Capital Exchange System, which has moved from regulatory milestone to live trading this year. The LSE’s Private Securities Market completed its first trade on March 25, in a tradable investment company holding secondary shares in Oxford Science Enterprises’ venture portfolio. Asset Match joined the LSE and JP Jenkins as an approved operator on April 22, notably without the quantitative admission thresholds the LSE applies.

Two employee liquidity deals followed in July. Wayve completed an $85m employee tender on the LSE’s platform, which PitchBook calls the largest PISCES transaction to date. PitchBook reports that it priced at a 10% discount to Wayve’s last round, with ARK Invest, Liberty Street, G Squared and Launchbay Capital among the buyers. We have not independently confirmed the discount or the buyer list.

Moneybox also ran a PISCES sale, and here the figures need a correction. PitchBook describes it as a roughly £800m secondary sale. Moneybox’s own July 13 announcement puts its valuation at about £800m and the sale at up to £45m of shares for long-serving employees, run through Crowdcube on the LSE’s Private Securities Market.

PitchBook’s broader point holds either way. These deals solved employee liquidity without a listing, which is why some in the market now argue PISCES could delay IPOs rather than lead to them. For secondaries buyers, that means a regulated venue for late-stage VC paper. For Europe’s IPO pipeline, it means one more reason to stay private.

Public filings show that the assets sold included a stake in EQT VII, EQT’s 2015-vintage flagship buyout fund. Pricing and the discount to NAV have not been disclosed. TRS, Coller EQT and Jefferies have not commented on the record.

What TRS said in 2024

In July 2024, the TRS board cut the system’s long-term private equity target from 14% to 12%. At the end of March 2024, TRS held $33.7bn of private equity, or 16.7% of a then-$202bn portfolio. It was already over its old target before the new one took effect. Getting to 12% meant shedding roughly $9.7bn of exposure.

The plan at the time was to get there passively. At the July 2024 board meeting, Neil Randall, TRS’s head of private equity, said the pension did not plan to use secondary sales to reach the lower target, according to contemporaneous reporting by Bloomberg and the Dallas Morning News. Instead, TRS would stop writing large checks to big buyout funds and concentrate new commitments on smaller middle-market managers. Bloomberg reported that the transition would begin that October and take several years.

Passive rebalancing depends on distributions. When distributions stall, the overweight stays put.

Why the plan changed

The passive route relies on two things moving at once: new commitments slow, and existing funds return capital. TRS controlled the first. It did not control the second.

At December 31, 2024, the latest figure we can verify, TRS was still at 15.7% in private equity against the 12% long-term target. That is a percentage point lower than nine months earlier, with more than three points still to go. Strong public market returns also work against a pension in this position. TRS returned 15.9% in calendar 2025, which lifts the denominator but does nothing to accelerate exits in the numerator.

A $1bn sale covers only around a tenth of the original $9.7bn gap. But it shows the system is now willing to use the secondary market, which it explicitly ruled out two years ago. We do not have TRS’s current private equity weight, and TRS has not said whether further sales are planned.

_{Sources: Bloomberg, Dallas Morning News (2024 board meeting); Markets Group (Dec 2024 allocation); PitchBook (sale); EQT (acquisition dates).}

TRS is not alone

Large public allocators that once treated secondary sales as a last resort now use them to manage allocations. The TRS deal is smaller than the two most recent public pension precedents, but it fits the same pattern:

_{Sources: PitchBook; CPP Investments.}

Volume across the LP-led market supports the same reading. Evercore puts H1 2026 LP-led volume at $56bn, up 4% year over year.

The trouble is that those numbers are not the same number. Evercore, PJT Park Hill, Lazard and William Blair each count a different universe on a different basis, and at least one law firm has used the label for something far broader. What they agree on is direction: premium carry is spreading fast through GP-led secondaries.

Why it surfaced in secondaries rather than primaries is structural.

Carry stops being a convention

In a primary fund, 20% is a vintage-level convention, fixed at fundraising against a blind pool. A CV has no such anchor. Economics reset at transfer, and the lead buyer negotiates them against a single, fully diligenced asset whose upside the sponsor understands better than anyone at the table.

That turns carry into a live variable in every GP-led process, priced alongside the purchase price, sponsor rollover and the governance package. Super carry is what that variable looks like when the asset is strong enough to command it.

What counts as super carry

There is no market standard. Most sources draw the line at 20%, the old primary-fund convention. Evercore’s glossary defines super carry as “terms where carried interest can exceed 20%.” William Blair uses the same test. PJT, as reported by Bloomberg, counts anything above a standard 12% to 20% range.

_{Sources: Evercore H1 2026 Secondary Market Review; William Blair 2026 Secondary Market Report; Bloomberg, Oct. 7, 2026; Lazard Interim 2026 Secondary Market Report; Morgan Lewis Continuation Vehicles Report 2025 press release.}

The outlier matters. In its 2025 report, Morgan Lewis described 75% of CVs as having a tiered waterfall with super carry. Under that broader reading, almost any step-up qualifies. Its 2026 report drops the label and simply reports tiered carry. Those figures measure something far wider than the advisors’ 15% to 39%, and should never be read side by side as the same statistic.

How it works in practice

Super carry is almost always conditional. Bloomberg reports that some buyers require a 30% IRR, a 3.0x return on invested capital, or both, before the top tier applies. The highest carry rate Morgan Lewis observed in its 2025 study was 30%.

The table below is illustrative only. It assumes a $100 million CV, a ladder that pays 10% below 2.0x, 20% from 2.0x and 30% from 3.0x, and a full catch-up at each tier, so the applicable rate falls on all profit.

_{Illustrative arithmetic by Secondary Scoop, not a market-standard structure. Ignores preferred return mechanics and fees.}

Two things follow. First, investors earn more in absolute terms at every step, which is the core of the alignment argument. Blue Owl, one of the backers of Percheron Capital’s Big Brand Tire vehicle, told Bloomberg it supports structures “paying sponsors more only when investors earn more.”

Second, the sponsor’s share of each incremental dollar jumps sharply near the top. Moving from 2.4x to 3.2x adds $80 million of profit in this example, and the GP takes $38 million of it. That is the trade investors are making: a much larger slice of the outperformance in exchange for a stronger incentive to deliver it.

The hurdle level is the crucial detail. Buyers target roughly 2.3x gross over four years on single-asset CVs, according to Evercore. William Blair puts the net target at 2.2x for 2025. A 3.0x super tier therefore pays only if the asset clearly beats the buyer’s own underwriting case. One dealmaker told Bloomberg his firm expects only a fraction of these agreements ever to trigger.

Why it lives in secondaries

Super carry is not a secondaries invention. Accel-KKR already takes it on its primary funds, according to Bloomberg, and PitchBook points to Bain Capital’s B-class LP interests, which carry a 30% profit share offset by a lower management fee. But the secondaries market is where it has become visible and measurable, for four structural reasons.

• Every CV is a fresh negotiation. Primary fund terms are set once per vintage. A CV resets economics on every deal, so carry can move asset by asset.

• The assets are trophies. Single-asset CVs reached $34 billion in H1 2026, up 88%, per Evercore. Campbell Lutyens has them at 62% of GP-led volume, up from 48% in 2025. Sponsors are bringing their best companies, and the best companies command terms.

• Price has little room left to rise. Lazard says 23% of single-asset CV volume priced above par in 1H 2026, up from 8% in 2025. Campbell Lutyens has 69% at par or better. When price is already at NAV, carry becomes another lever for winning a deal.

• Buyers are competing for allocation. Lazard’s surveyed buyers hold about $77 billion earmarked for H2 GP-led deals, against a $61 billion first half. Evercore says investors increasingly offer super carry to differentiate bids in competitive processes, concentrated in the highest-quality assets.

That last point turns the usual narrative around. Super carry is often framed as sponsors extracting more. Evercore’s description is of buyers volunteering it to win. Both happen. Several investors balked at Parthenon Capital’s terms on Kroll Bond Rating Agency before HarbourVest agreed, and lead buyer Coller EQT rejected Lightspeed Venture Partners’ 25% proposal on a multi-asset venture CV, according to Bloomberg’s unnamed sources.

How much of the market has it

_{*Evercore’s FY2025 figure as reported by PitchBook; the H1 2026 review shows only the current figure. PJT figure as reported by Bloomberg; the report is not publicly available. Jefferies and Campbell Lutyens do not quantify super carry in their H1 2026 reports.}

Read the table for direction, not precision. Evercore weights by dollars, so a handful of large trophy deals can move its share. William Blair counts funds. PJT looks only at single-asset deals. Each dataset also reflects the advisor’s own deal flow. Still, four independent sources pointing the same way is a stronger signal than any one of them.

Who pays for it

Every CV has three constituencies: the new buyers, the LPs who roll, and the LPs who sell. Super carry lands differently on each.

New buyers negotiate it directly and price it in. Selling LPs may pay indirectly: PitchBook reports concern that buyers offset the promise of super carry with a lower purchase price for the asset. Rolling LPs are the sharpest question, because the sponsor often crystallizes carry from the original fund at the transfer and then gets a richer carry opportunity in the new vehicle.

That is where super carry meets the LP governance agenda. ILPA’s proposed updated continuation vehicle guidance, released June 24, 2026, says there should be no overall increase in fees or carry for rolling LPs, backed by comparative modeling, according to a Mayer Brown analysis. Final guidance is expected later this year. Split economics are already common: Morgan Lewis found 31% of CVs charged rolling LPs a different management fee than new investors.

The alignment math is also shifting underneath. Morgan Lewis found 75% of 2025-26 CVs had sponsor commitments between 0.1% and 5% of investor commitments, up from 42% in 2021-24. Other datasets cited in the market point the other way, so the trend is contested. But if sponsors are putting in less capital while asking for more carry, the case that super carry improves alignment gets harder to make.

It arrives later than planned. When the partnership was announced in November 2025, the two firms said they would build two European evergreen funds during the first half of 2026: one in private equity secondaries and one in private debt. The secondaries fund has landed about a quarter late. Neither the October 6 launch release nor the September 17 completion release mentions the private debt fund, and we found no announcement of its launch.

The new vehicle is evergreen. It gives wealth investors access to ICG’s private equity LP secondaries strategy, buying existing fund interests from limited partners across North America and Europe. According to the release, it has already completed its first investment.

Until now, the partnership existed mainly on paper: a 10-year distribution agreement and an equity stake that was completed only in September. With this launch it becomes a business. A €2.6 trillion traditional asset manager owns part of a listed alternatives firm, holds exclusive rights to sell its evergreen products to wealth clients, and chose LP-led secondaries as the first product to sell.

Oliver Gardey and Ryan Levitt, Co-Portfolio Managers of Amundi ICG Global Private Equity Secondaries, at ICG, commented:

“The product combines ICG’s long-standing expertise in private equity secondaries, supported by its investment platform, underwriting discipline and market access, with Amundi’s structuring capabilities, knowledge of individual investors’ needs, and broad distribution reach”.

What launched, and what was already known

Most of the partnership’s terms were announced months ago. Here is what the October 6 release adds and what it repeats.

NEW ON OCTOBER 6

• Product name, evergreen format, and its link to ICG’s private equity LP secondaries strategy, with North American and European exposure.

• First investment completed, described only as high-quality, high-growth assets in the US and Europe. No name, size or deal type.

• Monthly subscriptions and potential quarterly redemptions, subject to limitations set out in the prospectus.

• Oliver Gardey and Ryan Levitt named co-portfolio managers.

• Comment from Amundi CIO Vincent Mortier, who called the launch “an important step in the Amundi-ICG partnership.”

PREVIOUSLY ANNOUNCED

• Nov. 18, 2025: 10-year agreement making Amundi the exclusive distributor of ICG’s evergreen and certain other products in the wealth channel. Two European evergreens (PE secondaries and private debt) were planned for the first half of 2026.

• Sept. 17, 2026: Amundi completed its 9.9% economic stake for about €620m. ICG’s contribution appears in Amundi’s results from Q3 2026.

• Sept. 17, 2026: ICG CEO Benoît Durteste said the first product would be an evergreen fund giving access to the LP Secondaries strategy.

What this means for the secondaries market

1. Evergreen capital is now part of the market’s plumbing

Evercore’s H1 2026 review, published in July, reports that 53% of surveyed secondary buyers now operate an evergreen vehicle. Secondary firms manage more than $130bn in semi-liquid evergreen AUM, and roughly 45% of it is allocated to secondaries. Evercore expects a further $25bn of inflows over the next 12 months, about $11bn of which would go into secondaries.

Evercore also notes two limits. Evergreen vehicles typically invest alongside flagship funds and finance a minority of each purchase price. And many managers are capping subscriptions to match the opportunity set. ICG’s product enters a market where this capital is already common, but where its size is still deliberately restrained.

2. LP portfolios have more bidders, and that compresses discounts

The ICG vehicle buys LP stakes only, and that is the segment where evergreen money is most visible. Evercore estimates evergreen and retail vehicles added roughly $40bn to the LP-led buyer universe over the last 12 months. Meanwhile, LP-led dry powder fell 15% in the first half of 2026 to $90bn, and the market-wide capital overhang is close to 1.0x. Pricing for high-quality buyout interests stayed around 90% of NAV.

This creates a tension at the center of every evergreen LP-led product. The discount to NAV at purchase is part of what these funds sell to wealth investors, because it shows up as an early valuation gain. The more evergreen money bids for LP portfolios, the narrower those discounts become. Each new evergreen launch makes the next deal slightly more expensive for all of them.

3. In Europe, distribution is the scarce asset

Most European secondaries managers have reached wealth clients through distribution agreements or platforms. Coller Capital signed Deutsche Bank in 2025 to sell CollerEquity to private banking clients and later added Titanbay’s platform. Ardian built Ardian Access with iCapital. Eurazeo sells through French insurance wrappers.

ICG and Amundi went further. Amundi holds equity in the manager and has board nomination rights. The exclusivity runs both ways: Amundi distributes ICG’s evergreen products, and ICG is Amundi’s exclusive provider of those products. The product was designed jointly. Amundi says its network serves more than 200 million individual investors, and the deal carves out the US, Australia and New Zealand. Amundi already buys secondaries through its Zurich-based Amundi Alpha Associates platform, but it chose to source this product from ICG.

4. Same team, two pools of capital

Gardey and Levitt led ICG’s debut LP Secondaries I fund, which closed at its $1bn hard cap in 2024 ($1.6bn including co-investment vehicles and SMAs). At ICG’s FY26 results in May, Durteste said LP secondaries would be in market during the year to March 2027. The evergreen therefore launches while the team raises its next institutional vintage.

In the same presentation, Durteste set ICG apart from asset gatherers. He said institutional investors are increasingly wary of managers whose deployment depends on

Benoît Durteste, CEO and CIO, ICG, FY26 results presentation, May 21, 2026

He also said those investors worry about conflicts of interest in deal allocation. The October 6 release does not explain how ICG will split LP deals between the evergreen and its next institutional fund. That allocation policy is the most useful disclosure ICG could still make, both for institutional LPs in the closed-end fund and for wealth investors in the evergreen.

5. The liquidity test came before the launch

The partners are launching after a difficult period for European evergreens. In June, Partners Group limited redemptions from its Global Value SICAV to 5% of NAV per quarter after requests reached an estimated 9.8% for the second quarter, according to an investor letter reported by Bloomberg. Partners Group has since said it has no plans to freeze any evergreen vehicle, and that the two funds in question have returned about 5x since inception. Bloomberg later reported that Partners Group plans to split the fund into compounding and distributing sub-portfolios.

ICG’s release describes quarterly redemptions as a “potential” and refers investors to the prospectus for liquidity management tools. That wording reflects the lesson from June: the gate is part of the product.

How many European players are doing the same?

8

European-headquartered managers, by our count, offer evergreen or semi-liquid vehicles that give wealth clients material secondaries exposure. Five run vehicles where secondaries are the core strategy; three hold secondaries as one sleeve of a broader private equity portfolio.

The count leaves out two groups. First, US managers that sell evergreen secondaries products into Europe, such as HarbourVest, Hamilton Lane, StepStone and Blackstone. Second, smaller European boutiques whose vehicles we have not verified. Including either would raise the number. Amundi’s own Alpha Associates buys secondaries for multi-manager mandates, but we found no dedicated evergreen secondaries vehicle from it.

Within this group, ICG’s structure is unusual on two points. The vehicle is defined explicitly as LP-led only. And it is the only one in our table where the distributor owns equity in the manager and co-designed the product.

That makes Multiplicity a useful lens on a question this publication keeps returning to: whether secondaries are a portfolio management tool or a distress signal. Hefti’s answer is that the tool matters most precisely where portfolios are messiest. We spoke with him about pricing assets when you don’t trust the NAV, why most deals fail his first filter, and why, in his view, not every DPI is created equal.

Learning secondaries on the worst assets

Multiplicity was born liquidating hedge fund portfolios after 2008, including side pockets and Lehman and Madoff claims. How did that shape the way you approach secondaries?

AH: We have a somewhat different background from the traditional private equity secondaries investors. We started our careers on the hedge fund side around 2000, and we ended up in the secondaries market more by accident. We worked for an alternative investment manager that had to liquidate large portfolios of external hedge fund investments after the global financial crisis. In 2009 we submitted a couple of billion in redemption requests to the underlying hedge funds, and we learned that a few of those funds were illiquid themselves. They had invested in structured credit that defaulted or became very illiquid after Lehman went bust. So in 2010 we started to sell those hedge fund side pockets, the funds that had gated redemptions and the funds that went into liquidation, in what was then a very new market.

We had to learn as we went: how to value accounts that were blocked with Lehman Brothers, how to value the toxic assets held in some of those side pockets. A broad set of things had gone wrong. You had emerging market funds that were gated. You had hedge funds with prime brokerage accounts at Lehman that ended up as insolvency claims. You had funds that had invested in a fraud like Madoff, which was only detected when people withdrew money in the wake of the crisis.

It’s a very different mindset from a traditional private equity investor who is always thinking about EBITDA multiples and EBITDA growth, the mechanics you can apply to every valuation out there. We have specifically looked at odd and special situations from the outset.

You spent six years as an advisor before launching your first fund in 2016. What made you switch sides?

AH: As an advisor and then as an intermediary, we did quite a lot of transactions outside the core mainstream private equity space: illiquid real estate funds in emerging markets, funds that were difficult or that blew up for whatever reason. We often had mandates on very difficult-to-sell deals, “hairy deals” as we called them, and we could not line up any buyer, even when we had a really motivated seller.

One example: a $3 billion fund-of-funds holding probably $10 or $15 million of NAV in year 13 or 14, in a real estate fund. We simply could not convince anyone on the planet to buy those residual positions. They couldn’t find a buyer to dissolve the fund-of-funds vehicle, and they were not price sensitive. They would have accepted almost any price. That got us thinking, and it led us to start our first fund in 2016 with the idea to provide liquidity where others don’t.

Why couldn’t you find a buyer?

AH: It’s still true to some degree today that the very vast majority, probably 90 to 95% of secondaries investors, are looking to cherry pick good funds with high-quality, growing assets and top-tier GPs that have been top performers for a long time. It’s in the nature of things that not everybody can be a superstar, and some funds are just not performing so well. That is not something the more established secondaries buyers want to touch.

We started in the wake of the financial crisis, and we saw quite a lot of investors make a fortune investing in very toxic assets in 2009 and 2010. For us, the credo is there’s no bad assets, there’s just bad prices. Ten years ago there was really nobody like that out there. By now there may be two or three other investors taking a truly opportunistic approach: if they can buy cheaply enough, even a not-so-good fund may still be a great investment.

“The credo is there’s no bad assets, there’s just bad prices.”

ANDRES HEFTI, MULTIPLICITY PARTNERS

But toxic assets in the crisis really were bad assets. Doesn’t that challenge the credo?

AH: For the original investor, for sure. To give a simplified example: say an investment of 100 has been marked down to 20 cents on the dollar. If we buy at 10 cents and later recover 30 cents, that is a good investment. Those are real numbers. We have bought quite a few assets that we saw as materially overvalued, at huge discounts, and then recovered much less than the reported NAV. It was still a good investment.

There are, of course, investments that will return nothing. There have been transactions where we may even have applied a negative value to something, just so the seller could take it off the books. But that’s really the exception. There are funds where we believe it’s quite likely nothing comes back, and we don’t need to waste time on those. And there are many funds that have not performed well where we believe the reported NAV is way too high, but where 60 or 70% of it may come back over the next three or four years. We would want to buy that at 20 or 30 cents on the dollar.

Price maker, not price taker

So providing liquidity where others don’t means buying what others won’t, at a price you believe is fair.

AH: Exactly. One of our mantras is that we want to be a price maker, not a price taker. So we stay away from large auction processes. I’m absolutely not suggesting there’s anything wrong with going after great assets that are growing and working with great GPs, but there are already probably 150 or 200 secondaries shops doing exactly that. We never felt we needed to be one more player going after great funds.

We focus either on complex deals, where something may have gone wrong in the past that others just don’t want to touch, or on very niche areas. If you look at secondaries market volume of $200 billion last year, probably about $160 billion, or 80%, was in private equity. There is a bit in venture, in infrastructure, in real estate, in real assets, in whatever niche assets you have. But by and large it’s private equity. Slice it regionally and you have at least 70% in the US and Western Europe; the rest of the world is much less liquid. A US buyout fund is typically ten times more liquid than an Asian real estate fund, or, God forbid, an infrastructure fund in Africa. It’s going to be extremely difficult to find a buyer for a niche asset like that.

Where do you focus geographically?

AH: We have no real focus. Intermediaries often ask us what is on Multiplicity’s wish list. My answer is always that our wish list is what no one else has on its wish list. We try to focus on deals where we’re pretty convinced no one else is really interested.

“Our wish list is what no one else has on its wish list.”

ANDRES HEFTI, MULTIPLICITY PARTNERS

Is that because other buyers aren’t interested, or because their mandates won’t let them look?

AH: I would say 80% of secondaries players have rather strict guidelines in their LPAs, or at least in their investor presentations, on how much they are allowed to do in private equity, in the US and Western Europe and in other places. They typically don’t have much capacity to do anything outside that. Our investment mandate is very opportunistic, broad and flexible. We couldn’t say it would always be one exact niche, but we knew there would always be transactions sitting in a gap in the market where no one else is interested. That’s why the fund is called LTO, for longer term opportunistic.

The main focus, 80 to 90%, is buying LP interests. Occasionally we have done direct distressed and special situations investments, but we found buying stakes in existing funds to be very fertile ground, along with more and more GP-led transactions in niche or special situations areas.

Three filters and a motivated seller

If you’re buying an LP stake in an older fund, presumably there are still good assets alongside the write-offs?

AH: Not always. We are particularly focused on older funds, quite often ten years plus, and they’re often quite concentrated by then. Maybe it was a good fund with ten companies and eight were sold. Now it has one that is hardly surviving and one that is in a turnaround, or some other issue, with the taxman or whatever.

Then where is the attraction?

AH: Every investment we look at goes through three filters. First, we look at whether it’s a competitive deal. If it’s a US buyout fund or a well-performing Scandinavian buyout fund, so many buyers are hunting for those positions that we don’t waste a second on it.

Second, once we understand it’s a niche deal, an African infrastructure fund or an underperforming Polish real estate fund where we believe no one is really interested, we focus only on situations with a motivated seller. Sometimes we see deals where the seller is just looking for someone to buy at a small discount, although they know it’s going to implode very soon. We’re not interested in tactical sellers trying to get out of a bad investment early enough. We focus on motivated sellers: a pension fund merging with another one that needs to clean up the book, or, a very typical example, a fund-of-funds at the very end of its life. If you invested a billion and you’re sitting on $10 million in year 15, and it may take another five years to get that last percent back, it’s not that painful to take even a 70% discount on that last little piece.

Third, if a deal passes the first two tests, we only invest if we have high conviction that money is coming back in the next two to three years. Of 100 deals, maybe 70 are kicked out by the first filter, then another half by the second, and maybe ten make it through. We’ve looked at some venture funds where we truly don’t believe a single cent comes back in the next five years, so we don’t pursue those. But there are cases where a fund has gone through a rough patch and is turning around. It has spent five years paying down debt and has now deleveraged the company enough to pay out money or sell it. We focus only on investments where there is a very robust exit story for how we get money back in two to three years.

“You cannot eat NAV”

How do you price an asset when you don’t trust the NAV?

AH: We never really take the NAV as a starting point. By doing our own research, looking at all the available information and talking to the GP, we try to understand how many dollars we should get back in the next two or three years. We discount that expected recovery back to today, and that’s how we arrive at our price. We don’t care much about the reported net asset value. That’s for the accountants. We always say you cannot eat NAV. We are really after actual cash, and DPI is king from the outset. Buying at a huge discount isn’t exciting for us at all. If we think we’re going to get 20 cents on the dollar back in two years’ time, we’ll probably pay 10 cents on the dollar. That’s still a good investment.

“We always say you cannot eat NAV.”

ANDRES HEFTI, MULTIPLICITY PARTNERS

It’s about understanding the underlying assets, and we’re absolutely laser focused on the exit. About 80% of our conversation with the GP centers on it. You have three companies left: when do you think you’re going to sell them, and to whom? Why haven’t you sold them already? The fund is in year 12, so they should have been sold five years ago. What went wrong? Maybe it was COVID. But COVID was five years ago, so why haven’t you recovered yet? Then we ask about the key premises of the exit plan, the milestones needed to make the asset sellable to that particular buyer, and plan B. Are they willing to sell at a relatively moderate exit price, or are they still hoping for a very high exit value? In the end, it’s about having true conviction that the exit story is credible and robust.

To flip it around, what we really don’t do is IPO stories. A typical IPO story depends on strong growth continuing for an extended period, and on a benign market where IPOs are happening. At the very least the second part can’t be controlled by anyone on this planet. We have heard hundreds of times a GP say they are absolutely convinced the company will IPO in 12 to 24 months. We all know how rarely that happens.

GP-leds for the less-than-stellar fund

You started as an LP-led specialist. How has the mix changed?

AH: We started really as an LP-led specialist buying tail-end portfolios, typically positions that had some difficulties or were niche. Over the past three or four years, GP-leds have become more and more important. In our current fund, almost half of our investments were a GP-led transaction in some form or shape.

In many funds that have been extended three or four times, the members of the LPAC are aware that GP-leds are a common tool to create liquidity and allow LPs in old funds to finally exit. We even see LPACs supporting or motivating the GP to go out and find a liquidity solution, including in funds that have not developed so well. So we see more and more GP-led transactions in less-than-stellar funds.

At IPEM, one of the main challenges raised about secondaries was transparency: knowing what you’re actually buying. How often does that stop a deal for you?

AH: Declining a transaction because there wasn’t enough transparency is quite an exception. With a fully flexible mandate, we have looked at fund-of-funds, and when you buy a stake in an existing fund-of-funds you may not get much transparency, because the manager is prohibited from sharing too many details on the underlying funds for confidentiality reasons. But in 90% of cases transparency isn’t an issue, and in GP-leds we typically have all the transparency we want. In a GP-led we also make sure the GP's interests are aligned with ours, which gives us a good sense of their true beliefs.

How do ticket sizes differ between the two?

AH: In LP-led transactions we’re often buying diversified portfolios of tail-end positions, so a single transaction may involve ten different LP interests, and the purchase price can be higher. Most of the GP-leds we do are multi-asset. As a small player, we wouldn’t do much more than $10 million for a single asset, and maybe $15 to $20 million for a multi-asset deal.

Who backs a strategy with no no-brainers

A strategy built on complexity must be harder to raise for. What kind of LPs back it?

AH: By design we’re different from the mainstream, so it’s a strategy that is more difficult to explain than a me-too strategy. We grew the LP base from friends and family, through our network and by word of mouth. It takes a certain trust in us as the GP that we do the right thing. Some of our investments may sound a bit adventurous. We even have a slogan: we never do no-brainers.

We’re also not providing a beta return. Some investors say they want private equity beta exposure, so they buy a broadly diversified secondaries fund that should move with the private equity industry. We can’t offer that. So it’s a more complex sell, and we have grown primarily through people who knew and trusted us before: Swiss family offices and Swiss private investors, quite a lot of them with backgrounds in financial markets, private markets or special situations investing. They understand our philosophy.

If existing LPs drive much of each new fund, what do those re-ups tell you about what investors value?

AH: We’re in a fortunate position, because we’re returning capital quite rapidly. Our funds are relatively short duration. We are now managing our fourth fund, and the first three have each returned their invested capital to investors, net of fees, within around four years of final close. Fund IV is developing well. So a lot of the money LPs need for a new commitment can be funded from distributions on the older funds.

We have also been very cautious in growing our fund sizes. We wanted to build a strong track record and make money through our carried interest, and our first three funds are all in carry territory. We do want to grow, and we see particularly good potential in GP-led transactions.

“DPI is king from the outset.”

ANDRES HEFTI, MULTIPLICITY PARTNERS

Your funds are domiciled in Jersey. How does that play with European LPs?

AH: Jersey is well accepted by investors in Switzerland, the UK and, I would say, the Benelux, at least by Dutch investors; we have a few. We don’t have much of an LP base in the Nordics yet, but regulatory-wise there’s no issue. Luxembourg is much more accepted and popular in Germany and France, so we do have some difficulty explaining to German or French investors why we are in Jersey. We need to show them it’s an equivalent jurisdiction to Luxembourg.

We chose Jersey for the quality of its fund administrators and service providers, at a cost that suits a fund of our size. As a small player, we want to limit the administrative cost burden.

The tail is getting bigger

Exits slowed again in the first half of 2026, yet secondaries volume keeps growing. Where will your next sellers come from?

AH: I’m not particularly good at making predictions. But there is so much money trapped in funds that are ten years and older. Nowadays I think more than 95% of all funds take materially longer than ten years to fully liquidate. And the 2016 vintage was just much bigger than the 2006 vintage, because the private markets industry grew so much. So tail-end fund assets are ballooning massively. At the same time, there is awareness that a secondaries market exists, and that GP-leds and continuation funds are a tool. So there will be plenty of tail-end liquidity solutions in the GP-led market. GP-leds may still be dominated by trophy asset deals for a few years, but the tail-end continuation fund in year 13 or 14 is going to be very important for us.

Mainstream financial media often frames secondaries less as a portfolio management tool and more as a way to engineer liquidity, or even to flatter returns. Is that fair?

AH: I know the aspect you mean. Some DPI is shown through continuation funds, and a lot of investors would say that is not very high-quality DPI. They would rather see a real exit. An IPO is a proper exit: new money comes in from the public market and goes to the original investors. Then there is the sale from one buyout firm to another [a secondary buyout], where no new money is created for the private equity universe as a whole. Then you have solutions like NAV loans, which are basically kicking the can down the road, and dividend recaps. Those are lower quality than GP-led transactions, where the asset stays with the same manager and no new money really comes into the universe. I think it’s a very fair point that some LPs don’t see every DPI as being of the same quality.

The brief is fundraising. Mallah will lead capital formation with sovereign wealth funds, family offices and financial institutions. The office takes Pantheon to 13 locations across four continents. The firm says it has worked with clients in every Gulf country for nearly two decades, so this is a move from flying in to being on the ground, not a first contact.

“Pantheon’s reputation as a global leader in secondaries and innovation in private markets solutions closely matches investor demand.”

Firas Mallah, managing director and head of Middle East, Pantheon

Mallah's other line from the announcement frames the client: "The Middle East is one of the fastest-growing sources of capital in private markets, and investors here are increasingly sophisticated about how they want exposure to the asset class." Pantheon says investor demand in the region is building across private equity, infrastructure and private credit, including secondaries.

EQT went first, with secondaries in reserve

A week earlier, on September 23, EQT launched a Middle East platform with its first office in ADGM. Jimmy Mahtani chairs the Gulf operation and Smiyet Belrhiti, head of Middle East and senior executive officer, runs the office. Bloomberg reported more than 10 professionals on the ground at launch.

The difference from Pantheon matters. EQT’s Abu Dhabi team covers private capital, infrastructure, capital raising and business operations. Secondaries, now the Coller-built franchise inside EQT, is not staffed locally. EQT says the platform will draw on its real estate and secondaries capabilities as opportunities develop. Pantheon is leading with secondaries. EQT is keeping them on the shelf.

“Abu Dhabi is a place where EQT has had the privilege of developing close ties over the past three decades with senior leaders at the largest regional investors.”

Jean Eric Salata, chair, EQT Group

The wider wave

Pantheon and EQT are the secondaries-relevant names in a crowded month. Funds Global MENA lists EQT, Sixth Street, Barings and Bain Capital among managers that have recently grown in the UAE. On the same day as Pantheon, Singapore’s Temasek said it plans offices in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi in the first half of 2027, subject to statutory approvals. Temasek is an investor, not a fund manager raising from Gulf LPs, so it belongs to a different story. It still adds to the pull of the region.

_{Sources: company announcements and press coverage, September 2026.}

The hub numbers explain the rush. ADGM reported 190 fund and asset managers at the end of the first half, up 23% year on year, with assets under management up 54%.

Why secondaries fit the Gulf right now

Gulf institutions are not just a source of primary commitments. They are building secondaries exposure on purpose, across asset classes, and they show up on both sides of the trade. That makes a firm with a large secondaries franchise a natural partner rather than a niche product pitch.

The clearest signal is how Abu Dhabi’s two biggest sovereign investors have set up dedicated secondaries vehicles with specialist managers. In March 2023, Mubadala formed a joint venture with Ares to invest in global credit secondaries, with about $1bn of initial deployment. In March 2026, ADIA launched a real estate secondaries platform with Ardian.

“This new platform reflects our confidence in both the growth potential of real estate secondaries and the strength of the long-standing relationship between ADIA and Ardian.”

Mohamed Al Qubaisi, executive director of real estate, ADIA

Mubadala’s head of credit investments, Fabrizio Bocciardi, framed the Ares deal the same way at the time, pointing to “the growing demand for diversified credit secondaries opportunities.” Credit and real estate are two of the newer corners of the secondaries market, and in both cases Gulf capital chose to commit early through a dedicated vehicle rather than wait for a fund.

Deal flow points the same way. On the buy side, ADIA bought into the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology endowment’s portfolio sale of roughly $1bn or more, with Jefferies advising, as PEI Secondaries Investor reported on September 22. On the sell side, the Abu Dhabi Investment Council, a separate entity from ADIA, shopped a portfolio of fund stakes worth more than $2bn in March, according to the same publication.

Kuwait has been explicit about where it sees value. Sheikh Saoud Salem Al-Sabah, managing director of the Kuwait Investment Authority, told the Qatar Economic Forum in May 2025 that “the opportunities in private equity are in secondaries and special situations.”

Put together, the Gulf now looks a lot like the rest of the large-LP world. Sovereigns use secondaries to reshape exposure, buy mature assets at a discount and recycle capital. That is a portfolio management habit, not a distress signal, and managers who can serve both sides of it are the ones moving in first.

To understand why a firm with roughly 4,000 lawyers acquired a practice instead of growing one, it helps to start with what secondaries lawyers actually do.

The quiet seat at the table

Investment banks and advisors, Jefferies, Evercore, PJT Park Hill, Lazard, get most of the attention in secondaries. They run the process, find the buyers and set the price. Law firms turn an agreed price into a transaction that can close and hold up afterward. In an LP portfolio sale, that work is comparatively contained: a purchase and sale agreement, transfer consents from each underlying GP, and the mechanics of moving fund interests between owners. In a GP-led deal, the legal workload multiplies.

Two forces have raised the stakes for this work. First, GP-leds now make up most of the market. Jefferies’ July 2026 review put H1 GP-led volume at $62bn, or 53% of total volume, up 32% year over year. Bespoke, conflict-heavy deals command specialist teams and premium fees in a way standardized LP transfers don’t. Second, the GP’s conflict, selling an asset from one fund it manages to another fund it manages, puts the legal process at the center of whether LPs see the deal as fair. The drafting, the LPAC consent process and the election offered to existing LPs are where that fairness is either demonstrated or not.

Why buy rather than build

A&O Shearman already had most of the adjacent products. Its fund finance and liquidity solutions practice lists NAV facilities, GP and management fee lines, and secondary and continuation facilities. It had hired Jan Sysel from Fried Frank in December 2025 to lead U.S. fund finance and rebuilt its Luxembourg funds bench with two Clifford Chance lawyers in August 2025. What it lacked was the transactional core. Four features of the secondaries market explain why growing that core internally would have been slow and uncertain.

1. It is a repeat-player village

A relatively small group of lead buyers, placement advisors and sponsors does a large share of GP-led deals, and they choose counsel largely on track record with each other. Stephenson Harwood’s own marketing leans on this idea, describing a “secondaries village” that rewards a collaborative approach. A newly built team starts with no seat in that village. A hired one arrives with relationships and a pipeline.

2. Precedent is the product

Secondaries documentation is highly negotiated and still evolving: price adjustment mechanics, carry rollover, LP election processes, GP commitment terms. Teams that have done hundreds of deals carry a bank of precedents and a read on what each lead buyer will accept. The incoming team claims more than 250 transactions. That’s years of learning a new group would have to accumulate one deal at a time.

3. Rankings attach to teams

Chambers ranks departments and individuals. In the current UK secondaries table, A&O Shearman isn’t ranked at all, and Clifford Chance, in Band 3, is the only other legacy Magic Circle firm listed. Building from scratch would mean years of submissions and client referees before reaching the top band. Buying the team gives A&O Shearman a credible claim — though not yet a guarantee — to a Band 1 slot in the next edition.

4. The market won’t wait

Jefferies reported $290bn of dedicated secondaries capital at mid-2026 and said the market is on pace for another record year, after $240bn in 2025. A multi-year organic build would mean missing the steepest part of the growth curve. That’s the logic Boghossian put in one line:

“This is a strategic bet on the growth of our market.”

Gabriel Boghossian, incoming global co-head of secondaries, A&O Shearman

A&O Shearman’s leaders made the same point in client terms. UK managing partner Denise Gibson said clients had told the firm they needed market-leading secondaries capability. Peter Banks, global co-head of private equity, described GP-leds as a permanent capital channel that sponsors now routinely weigh among their exit options.

Whole team versus partner by partner

The form of the deal matters as much as the decision to buy. Weil has been building its secondaries platform one partner at a time: Simon Saitowitz returned in 2025, and Charles Cooper-Isow joined from Kirkland in April 2026. A&O Shearman took the entire practice, both co-leaders and, per the firm, the full team. A lift-out keeps working relationships, internal precedents and client coverage intact on day one. Its risk is concentration: the practice depends heavily on two people, and on clients choosing to follow them.

What the team brings

Stephenson Harwood’s published credentials point to a European, and heavily DACH, mid-market GP-led franchise. They list Ufenau’s continuation funds (about €1bn combined across Ufenau Continuation 3 and 4), DPE Deutsche Private Equity’s roughly €700m first continuation fund, BID Equity Continuation Fund I ($300m, 2025), Ardian Expansion’s Syclef continuation fund (€530m, 2024) and Astorg’s Normec fund (€1.44bn, 2024). On the LP side, they list ICG Enterprise Trust’s purchase of 175 tail-end fund interests from abrdn and a portfolio sale for Tesco Pension Trustees. The materials don’t consistently say which party the firm represented, so we present these as the team’s published experience, not specific mandates.

We started with the global numbers, but the discussion kept pulling in one direction: what secondaries mean in markets where the exit problem is really a capital-recycling problem. That’s the thread this piece follows.

A different problem wearing the same name

The global secondaries market is on track for another record, with GP-led volume growing around 35% this year. In mature markets, the dominant driver is increasingly strategic: managers using continuation vehicles to hold onto their best assets rather than sell them to a competitor.

Emerging markets are catching the same wave, but for a different reason. Here, the constraint isn’t whether a GP wants to keep a trophy asset. It’s that the largest investors in the asset class, development finance institutions and state-backed programs, are running out of room to make new commitments.

“Primary capital done in Africa is 80% done by DFIs.”

When one type of investor supplies most of a market’s primary capital, its liquidity becomes the market’s liquidity. DFIs are now under pressure from their government shareholders to recycle money back, and many are building dedicated liquidity departments to do it. The logic is simple: no sales, no new fund commitments.

“And that’s the only way for them to get additional primary capital.”

That makes emerging-markets secondaries something closer to public infrastructure than a trading strategy. If DFIs can’t exit older positions, first-time and emerging managers lose their anchor investor, and the pipeline of new funds slows. The expectation from the discussion is that DFIs will sell LP positions in a much heavier way over the coming years, creating a product need that the market is only beginning to serve.

CEE: when a whole vintage has to close at once

Central and Eastern Europe shows what happens when a private market is built largely on public money. The region holds an estimated $20 billion of unrealized value on roughly $14 billion invested, and raises about $1.5 billion to $2 billion of primary capital a year. For every new dollar invested, only around 40 cents is coming back as liquidity.

“Gravity works exactly the same way in Warsaw as it does in London, New York.”

Hungary is the extreme case. Between 2010 and 2012, around 30 new funds with 30 new managers launched almost simultaneously, on public capital, with no prior market to learn from. A decade later, they all needed to close together. Because they were regulated public vehicles, they faced hard deadlines, had to account for gains and losses to close the book, and generally could not use continuation vehicles.

A forced, synchronized seller with few bidders is the textbook setup for deep discounts. Buyers who stepped in bought entire portfolios, held them for three to four years toward realistic exits, and did so without initially thinking of it as a secondaries business.

“We realized later that it’s secondary what we are doing.”

It also created a model that looks nothing like Western VC secondaries. Instead of buying 5%–10% from a founder or early investor, buyers took 30%–40% fully vested stakes or whole portfolios and ran them to exit, using earn-outs to share future upside with sellers who had accepted steep entry prices. As public money shifts toward co-investment structures, private secondary capital has become a precondition for the next vintage of CEE funds to raise at all.

The discount map: dispersion is the story

In mature markets, pricing discussions center on a few points of NAV. Across emerging markets, the spread is enormous, driven by GP quality, reporting standards, macro stress and the number of buyers at the table.

“The less sophisticated the market is, the more discounts we see.”

Two things stand out. First, Eastern Europe has quietly become the “developed” end of the emerging-markets spectrum: tight discounts, credible NAVs and enough liquidity that a buyer can also sell. That makes it attractive for risk-conscious secondaries buyers, even if it isn’t where the deep value is.

Second, competition matters as much as fundamentals. Where a single asset or portfolio in the West might draw 20 bidders, many emerging-markets deals have one or two. Sellers under regulatory or political pressure to close have little leverage, and structures, earn-outs, deferred and phased payments, do the work of bridging the gap between a seller’s NAV and a buyer’s mid-20s return target.

The real edge is knowing the GP

In mature markets, diligence starts with reporting. In frontier markets, reporting can’t carry the weight on its own. The approach that emerged from the discussion is blunt: pricing is only efficient when the buyer already understands how a GP values its portfolio.

“We just prioritize the GPs that we know well.”, said one of the speakers.

Without that familiarity, bids get priced so conservatively that deals rarely close. With it, even an African fund can be priced with confidence. That turns long-standing primary relationships into the main competitive advantage in emerging-markets secondaries, and explains why the most active buyers are often investors who have been LPs in these markets for 15 years, not newly launched dedicated funds.

It is also pushing some of those investors to reorganize. Holding periods for primaries and secondaries don’t match well, so at least one emerging-markets investor is now separating the two, running primaries through separately managed accounts and building dedicated secondaries buckets, currently around $20 million in size. The track record behind that goes back further than many expect: its first emerging-markets secondary was done in Africa in 2011.

When the buyer has to become the liquidator

The hardest part of emerging-markets secondaries isn’t buying. It’s what happens when the GP has no remaining alignment to run the portfolio. In that case, the buyer either rebuilds the incentives or takes a more active role in winding the fund down.

“You have to be also sharpening your skills, strengthening your muscles on liquidating the companies.”

This is a genuinely different job from the mature-market secondaries model, where a buyer typically underwrites NAV and waits for the GP to exit. In frontier markets, particularly Africa, some funds may have no path to value other than an active liquidation.

Continuation vehicles, emerging-markets style

Continuation vehicles in these markets rarely look like the single-asset trophy deals dominating headlines in New York and London. One early example was a Brazilian deal around 2016–2017, triggered when a GP team split and the departing team needed backing to take its portfolio with it. Another, currently in progress in Africa, is a bridge vehicle for a company the GP has been trying to sell for more than three years.

The conflict debate shifts accordingly. In mature markets, critics ask whether the GP is buying from itself too cheaply. In emerging markets, the realistic alternative is often a fire sale, 50 cents on NAV versus 60 or 70 cents through a structured vehicle. The benchmark is the counterfactual, and trust depends on the buyer seeing the full sale history and every offer received.

“The continuation vehicle should provide a better option than a fire sale.”

Is it worth it?

The returns case for emerging-markets secondaries follows the global pattern, only more pronounced. Early distributions drive strong IRRs, secondary GP-led and LP-led deals in emerging markets were cited as delivering more than 30% IRR, but multiples can trail direct co-investments and the best primary funds. Buyers get their money back faster, with lower volatility and fewer home runs.

For DFIs and development-minded LPs, though, the returns question has a second dimension. Every position sold is capital that can be recommitted to a new fund. The value of a functioning secondaries market is measured not only in IRR, but in how many new vintages it makes possible.

The appointment follows the firm’s August 3 announcement of more than $5 billion in commitments for its latest Secondaries Investment Program, including a $2.7 billion final close of Global Secondary Fund 8, roughly 50% larger than its previous program. It also turns a view Adams Street has been voicing for months into an organizational commitment: in the firm’s 2026 Global Investor Survey, which we covered in April, Head of Secondary Investments Jeff Akers listed venture secondaries among the areas regaining appeal as valuations stabilize and the IPO window reopens.

The platform she is joining

Adams Street’s secondaries business is one of the oldest in the market, active since 1986, and while it spans buyout, venture and growth fund interests, its center of gravity has been mid-market buyout: the firm’s own description of its 2025 Real Deals “Secondary Investor of the Year” award emphasizes middle-market, private equity-backed transactions. The team pursues three types of deals: traditional purchases of LP interests, structured acquisitions of portfolios of direct company interests, and liquidity solutions for GPs.

Huang Burns becomes the fifth partner listed on the Secondary Investments team page, alongside Jeffrey Akers, Troy Barnett and Joseph Goldrick in Chicago and Pinal Nicum in London. She is the only one of the five based on the West Coast, a detail that matters in a segment where sourcing is driven by proximity to Sand Hill Road GPs. Adams Street does not disclose how much of its secondaries activity has historically been venture, so the scale of the step-up is not yet measurable from public information.

Her Adams Street bio describes a broad remit that spans strategy, investments, fundraising and portfolio construction for the secondaries business, with particular emphasis on venture. The press release is more specific about the deal flow: she will source, underwrite and execute LP interest and continuation vehicle transactions across the venture landscape, working closely with the Primary Investments and Venture Growth teams.

“Venture secondaries are an increasingly important opportunity for our clients.”

Jeff Akers, Partner & Head of Secondary Investments, Adams Street Partners

Akers framed the hire around the combination of Huang Burns’ track record leading venture-focused secondary deals with Adams Street’s longstanding GP relationships and capital base. Huang Burns, for her part, pointed to the firm’s established secondaries platform and its network of venture relationships as the foundation she intends to build the franchise on.

Huang Burns’ mandate, as described by Adams Street, sits in the second category. Comparing her opportunity set to the headline direct-secondaries figures would overstate it by an order of magnitude.

Hiring into the flat segment

The timing is counter-cyclical. According to Evercore’s H1 2026 Secondary Market Review, total secondaries volume hit a record $121bn in the first half, up about 19% year-over-year. Venture was the exception: volume held flat at around $5bn, split evenly between GP-led and LP-led deals, and dedicated dry powder was also flat at about $10bn, concentrated among a small group of specialists.

Evercore attributes the stall to two forces. Leading AI and private tech companies are raising capital frequently at rapidly rising marks, which keeps resetting reference valuations. At the same time, the early-2026 sell-off in public software on AI-disruption fears fed into private marks, widening bid-ask spreads and pushing buyers out of processes for much of the half.

The result is a dispersed pricing environment. Evercore describes top-quartile venture franchises clearing at a modest discount or better, while weaker performers trade far lower, a “K-shaped pricing environment with a hollow middle.” Jefferies’ H1 2026 review reaches a similar conclusion from the sell side: venture-focused LP portfolios were a notable source of supply, but most buyers concentrated on portfolios featuring leading companies and top-tier managers, widening the spread of outcomes.

For a buyer, that is not necessarily a bad setup. Evercore characterizes the segment as firmly buyer-favorable, with modest dedicated capital relative to seller supply, and more than 84% of surveyed buyers expect year-over-year growth. Its own outlook is that buyers positioning now will be best placed when IPO and M&A windows reopen.

Most coverage has treated the departure as the end of the star-dealmaker era at the world’s largest alternative asset manager. For Secondary Scoop, one detail matters more. Blackstone’s secondaries franchise, Strategic Partners, is one of the largest in the world, and Baratta never built it, never ran it, and was never its public face.

How the firm grew that business while he ran buyouts says a lot about where Blackstone is heading.

The buyout architect

Baratta joined Blackstone in 1998, when the firm had just closed its third flagship buyout fund and ran a single private equity strategy. In 2001 he moved to London to set up the European private equity business. He became global head of private equity in 2012. Deals he worked on include Merlin Entertainments, the Legoland owner, and Hilton, where Bloomberg reports Blackstone ultimately tripled its investment.

In January 2025 he moved up to a newly created role, global head of private equity strategies, which Bloomberg says required all fund heads in that category to report to him. At the same time, tech dealmaker Martin Brand took over day-to-day management of the flagship fund. Many insiders read the promotion as a step toward his exit, Bloomberg reported.

His later record is mixed. The four most recent flagship funds that have finished investing all showed net IRRs of 12% or less at the end of June, according to Bloomberg. The latest flagship raised $21bn against initial expectations of $30bn.

“Given the strength of the leaders for each of our dedicated PE verticals today, we do not intend to replace Joe’s role.”

Steve Schwarzman and Jon Gray, internal memo to employees, as reported by Bloomberg

The business that ran on its own clock

Strategic Partners did not come out of Blackstone’s buyout culture. Stephen Can founded it in 2000 inside Credit Suisse, and Verdun Perry joined at its founding. Blackstone agreed to buy it in April 2013, the year after Baratta became global head of private equity. At the time it had $9bn in assets under management.

Tony James, then Blackstone’s president and COO, fronted that deal, not the private equity chief. “Strategic Partners complements Blackstone’s existing businesses, and we expect to be able to grow its franchise and help it enter new product areas,” James said at the time.

It then did exactly that, and largely under the same leadership. Blackstone’s own biography says Perry “chairs the investment committee for each of Strategic Partners’ funds”. Baratta’s biography describes his remit differently: “He currently oversees all of the firm’s directly-invested private equity strategies.” A fund-of-funds secondaries business that buys LP interests in other managers’ funds falls outside that definition.

So the business grew tenfold in 13 years through a path separate from the buyout chain of command. It added new lanes one at a time, each with its own head. Mark Burton runs real estate secondaries, Mark Bhupathi runs infrastructure secondaries and Joshua Blaine runs GP stakes, all under Perry.

There is one gap we could not close. Bloomberg describes Baratta’s 2025 role as covering all private equity fund heads, and Blackstone reports Strategic Partners inside its private equity segment. We found no public source confirming that Perry reported to Baratta. When Baratta was promoted, Bloomberg put the teams he would lead at around $210bn. By June 30, 2025, the full private equity segment held $389bn, according to a BXPE filing. The dates differ, but the gap between those two figures suggests his remit never covered the whole segment. That is our inference, not a confirmed fact. Perry is also absent from the list of PE leaders Bloomberg names as the post-Baratta bench.

What that tells us about where Blackstone is going

Bloomberg’s second report describes Blackstone moving away from a firm dominated by a handful of star investors toward “a sprawling institution” built on a wider bench of leaders with narrower responsibilities. Real estate has already gone to co-heads to limit key-person risk. Private equity now splits across Martin Brand (core PE and the flagship funds), Jas Khaira (Blackstone N1), Viral Patel (BXPE) and Chris James (Tactical Opportunities).

Strategic Partners has worked this way for years: one long-tenured global head, specialist lanes with their own leaders, and a franchise brand that matters more than any single dealmaker. Three signals suggest this is the direction for the whole firm.

1 · GROWTH IS COMING FROM OUTSIDE THE FLAGSHIP

Blackstone’s private equity assets rose 17% year on year in the second quarter, Bloomberg reports, but that bucket includes infrastructure, secondaries and Tactical Opportunities. The flagship buyout fund fell well short of its fundraising expectations. Secondaries has been raising funds at record scale. Blackstone does not break out how much of the 17% came from each strategy, so we cannot say how much secondaries contributed. The direction is still clear. Gray said in July 2025, referring to secondaries: “The returns have been very strong over time in this area, and that’s making it attractive to investors.”

2 · SECONDARIES FITS THE RETAIL MACHINE

Gray’s central project is turning Blackstone into a manager for individual and retirement savers. BXPE, the evergreen private equity fund launched in January 2024 and now run by Viral Patel, already has a place for Strategic Partners. Its disclosures state that “investments are generally classified as Secondaries if they are sourced by Strategic Partners or structured as passive equity co-invest positions.” The sleeve is still small, at 4% of the portfolio as of March 31, 2025, according to a third-party analysis of BXPE’s reporting. Secondaries brings diversified, already-seasoned exposure and earlier cash flows, which suits a semi-liquid vehicle that has to meet redemptions. Perry has been talking up retail access since at least 2022, when he told an IPEM audience that the arrival of retail investors was among the biggest changes in the asset class.

3 · THE INSTITUTION IS THE BRAND

Strategic Partners’ fundraising copy does not sell a dealmaker. It sells scale: roughly 2,400 transactions since 2000 and “the power of the Blackstone Strategic Partners brand,” as Perry put it when SP Infrastructure IV closed. That is the pitch Gray now needs across the firm, because retail distribution runs on brand and process rather than on individual reputation.

“With substantial scale and our multi-strategy footprint, we believe we are well-positioned to capitalize on the vast, and growing, opportunities across the secondary market.”

Verdun Perry, Global Head of Blackstone Strategic Partners, January 2023

Baratta’s real secondaries legacy may be supply

Baratta leaves a mark on secondaries through the buyout portfolio he oversaw, not through the secondaries team. Bloomberg describes an industry weighed down by a backlog of unsold assets bought at high prices when rates were low. Blackstone’s recent flagships show that in their returns. Assets held too long in funds nearing the end of their lives are exactly what the GP-led market exists to handle.

One example has already surfaced. In October 2025, A Media Operator cited industry sources saying Blackstone could consider a continuation fund with a minority investor for Clarion, which it has owned since 2017, after a sale process stalled. The same report said Clarion was likely held in the 2015-vintage BCP VII, whose life runs to the end of 2027. That remains speculation, and Blackstone has not announced any such deal. But it shows the kind of decision Martin Brand’s team will face across the vintages Baratta leaves behind: sell into a weak market, extend, or run a continuation vehicle.

If those GP-led processes happen, the obvious question is who leads the pricing. Blackstone’s own secondaries franchise is one of the few buyers big enough to anchor large deals. It is also on the same side of the table as the seller.