Apollo’s Wealthy Customers Want In on the Private Markets Boom

(Bloomberg) -- For years, the best opportunities in private markets were snapped up by institutional investors. Now, Apollo Global Management Inc. is helping the world’s ultra-wealthy get in on the action.

The asset management giant has seen some wealth investors allocate as much as 50% of their portfolio to private markets, said Véronique Fournier, who leads wealth distribution in Europe, the Middle East and Africa on Apollo’s global wealth management solutions team.

“Typically you have had most of our clients coming from the institutional space,” Fournier said in a Bloomberg Television interview from the sidelines of the IPEM private equity conference in Cannes. “It really has been a great development in the industry to have seen also wealth investors now looking to have access to the great solutions that you can find in private markets.”

Apollo and its rivals KKR & Co. and Blackstone Inc. have been targeting the world’s wealthy to fuel the next phase of growth for private equity, credit and alternative assets. Still, returns in private markets can vary much more widely than those in stock and bond markets, with the quality of individual managers playing a far greater role.