Private market solutions
We offer research, advice and implementation services to help you build or evolve your private markets portfolio. Whether you’re seeking to enhance portfolio resilience to market volatility, add exposure to innovative companies and projects, or access hard-to-reach managers, we construct custom strategies to suit your investment needs.
A holistic approach to your private markets journey.
Private markets have many qualities that make it attractive to investors – including diversification, innovation, and potential for higher growth. However, these markets have several barriers to entry, including challenges around complexity, illiquidity, fees and governance often cited as reasons for not allocating. Whether you’re seeking to better understand the potential for dispersion in performance or reach traditionally hard-to-access managers, we’re here to offer the advice, research and solutions to help you implement a holistic solution that draws on private equity, private debt, co-investment and secondaries, impact and real asset strategies.
What are some common private market investment strategies?
What do I need to consider when investing in private markets?
First, you need to decide how much of your total portfolio you’re comfortable allocating to less liquid, long-term investments. You should consider your ongoing cash flow requirements and recognize that the capital you commit to private market investments will be invested incrementally over time, and you will need to have cash available when a capital call arrives.
In private markets, the difference between the returns made by the best and worst performing asset managers can be considerable and are often much wider than in traditional asset classes. We believe capturing the most attractive opportunities requires active sourcing, research and access to high-quality, specialist private markets asset managers. Asset manager selection is where you need to choose the right collaborator who understands your needs and has the depth of experience to help you implement a private markets solution.
Due to the capital-intensive nature of private market investments, most asset managers focus on a small number of assets in their portfolios. For example, in private equity or infrastructure, there may be as few as ten underlying assets in an individual manager’s fund. Allocating to a range of private markets strategies can help diversify your portfolio by number of underlying investments, manager, strategy, geography and vintage year.
Most private markets managers offer their investment strategies through closed-end fund structures and raise capital infrequently, with limited capacity. You need to put a robust commitment plan in place to build up and maintain your exposure at your desired target level over time.
Once you’ve implemented your strategy, we believe it is vital to monitor underlying investments and ensure you are comfortable that your portfolio is on the right track. This is called good governance. It’s particularly critical to assess your liquidity budget and commitment plan on an ongoing basis. This helps keep your strategy and target allocation in line with your desired position.
Operational, legal and tax due diligence is crucial, given that investment structures are in limited liquidity vehicles, with little option to action any changes after your initial commitment. These areas require careful consideration and rigorous assessment before committing to any private market investments.
How we can help you integrate private markets into your investment portfolio
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Asset manager research
MercerInsight® provides institutional investors with access to Mercer’s forward-looking research, including ESG ratings and operational due-diligence reports, along with data and analytics on asset managers and thousands of strategies across public and private markets. -
Consulting and advice
Mercer’s private markets specialists bring a holistic perspective to help you define a private markets strategy that is best aligned to your overall investment objectives. We advise on strategy, asset allocation and governance structure. -
Investment implementation
We can help you design and execute your private markets investment strategy. Working as an extension of your team, we help you with governance and due diligence, risk mitigation, cost management. We flex our solutions to suit your investment needs.
Get started with private market investing
Why consider private markets?
Building your private markets portfolio
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