When financial advisors think about alternative asset managers playing in the private wealth arena, the names that first come to mind are often U.S.-based organizations—Blackstone, BlackRock, Apollo, KKR. But one of the biggest global names in the private equity space is EQT, a Stockholm-based firm with over $319 billion in total AUM. While EQT has been a long-time player serving U.S. institutional investors, in the past three years, the firm has also been trying to grow its business among U.S. private wealth clients. It currently operates evergreen funds targeting private equity, real estate and infrastructure that are open to individual investors stateside.
In mid-January, EQT also acquired Coller Capital, a U.K.-based global secondaries player with approximately $50 billion in AUM. The goal is to get access to Coller Capital’s secondaries strategies in general, and in particular, to its private credit secondaries investments, where EQT currently sees an attractive opportunity, said Peter Aliprantis, partner and head of private wealth Americas at the firm. Prior to joining EQT in 2024, Aliprantis spent over a decade as managing director at alternative asset manager TPG Angelo Gordon, where he handled new business development and intermediary distribution.
Wealth Management spoke with Aliprantis about EQT’s ongoing expansion into the U.S. private wealth sector and how the firm is courting U.S.-based financial advisors.
This Q&A has been edited for length, style and clarity.
Wealth Management: What makes the firm view the U.S. private wealth channel as an attractive source of growth right now?
Peter Aliprantis: The U.S. private wealth channel has historically, and over the last five to 10 years, become very fertile ground for raising capital in private markets. I’ve been in this business for over 30 years, specifically in private wealth—I was in the private wealth business before it was cool to be in the private wealth business. Over 10 years ago, the private wealth business was not a huge source of asset gathering for private markets. It has become that today, and many other big names across private markets are very active in the private wealth space, not only in the U.S., but outside it.
If you look at the numbers, the U.S. is the largest private wealth business in the world, and so the firm made a substantial decision to invest here. We started that process probably three years ago in the U.S.
WM: There are several different tiers of private wealth investors. Who is your target investor within that space?
PA: I would say we are focused on multiple client segments within private wealth. We are obviously very interested and engaged with the ultra-high-net-worth investors or qualified purchaser investors. A lot of them are looking at a combination of things, whether it’s drawdown structures or evergreen structures. But we are also very interested in working directly with what we would call the mass affluent market, the accredited investor market, because those are very important markets as well.
WM: Are any of your products going to be aimed at non-accredited investors, your bottom-level retail investor?
PA: That’s not our primary goal, but as the market evolves, I would imagine we would have structures and strategies that cater to that market. In fact, when you look at what’s happening now in the 401K market, I am assuming that will change over time. We are in the very early stages of that, but yes, I would imagine we would focus on that at some point.
WM: Does the firm have a specific growth objective for its private wealth division?
PA: We currently have of the capital that we manage, about 9% or 10% of it is private wealth. The idea is to grow that to somewhere between 20% and 25% globally over the next three to five years.
WM: Can you talk about what kinds of investment vehicles you have available for private wealth clients?
PA: Right now, we have a combination of more traditional drawdown structure products for our flagship funds, in private equity, infrastructure and real estate. And in addition to that, in the U.S., we have three evergreen strategies: one for private equity, one for infrastructure and one for real estate. We also have three additional evergreens available outside the U.S., for non-U.S. investors.
WM: What types of evergreen vehicles are you using in the U.S.?
PA: The private equity and infrastructure strategies are in Opco structures. And the real estate structure is a non-traded REIT.
WM: Is brand name recognition an issue that you have come across among U.S. advisors? How do you ensure EQT is easily recognizable stateside?
PA: EQT has been in the U.S. for a long time, and about a third of our assets are invested here. What is new is our operation in private wealth, which started here about three years ago. And so, we may not be as well-known as Blackstone, or Apollo or KKR or some other names, but what I can tell you is that we are the second-largest private equity firm in the world. When we tell people that, they are usually pretty surprised.
When we sit with a financial advisor, we say, “Have you heard of EQT? What do you know about EQT as an organization?” I can tell you that the reaction is almost uniform. They say, “We kind of know who you are, but why don’t you tell us a little bit more about the firm?” So we go through some of the details, the size and the scale of the business, the fact that we are the second-largest private equity firm in the world and have the largest value-added infrastructure business, and we are tenth in the world in real estate. And the reaction to that is: “How is it possible that we don’t know who you are?” That’s the challenge, but more importantly, that’s a big part of the opportunity. The more we tell the story, the more people want to do business with us
WM: How do you get your private wealth-focused products in front of financial advisors?
PA: We obviously work with all of the large distribution partners at the wirehouses and also several of the largest global private banks. In addition to that, we work in the RIA channel, working with some of the intermediaries that operate in that channel, like CAIS and iCapital. But we also have direct relationships with RIAs. We are working with the IBD community, as well as the family office channel.
WM: How are you using the CAIS and iCapital platforms?
PA: iCapital and CAIS provide a number of different benefits for us. One of them is technological and account-related. There are about 17,000 RIAs in the United States. Even if you have a salesforce of 13, 15, 20 people, it’s very hard to cover 17,000 RIAs. So, CAIS and iCapital provide an intermediary service where they allow us to connect with many of these RIAs, both from a technological perspective, but also from an introduction perspective. We sponsor, attend and present at several of both the CAIS and iCapital conferences around the country, and around the world, actually. And we work with them to help us get introductions to RIAs that they may not know. And it gives us a lot of brand recognition and introductions to people at a lot of the aggregator RIAs, who we might not know as well.
WM: Do you have any educational initiatives for advisors to get them more familiar with the types of products you are selling?
PA: The firm has a part of the business called ThinQ. It’s a content-related business that produces content and it goes across the broad spectrum of advisors who may be very early on in their private markets journey and may want to just understand what is private equity or what is infrastructure how can I incorporate that in my client’s asset allocation. And then we have things that are more targeted toward advisors who are further along. They may want to know more about infrastructure and what the energy opportunities are that power the infrastructure trade as it relates to data centers, battery power, and regenerative power. That’s one of the ways we work with advisors and get them content and get them to learn about private equity, infrastructure and real estate and sometimes, more specifically, about how to allocate to those strategies within an overall portfolio. In fact, I just published an article on our ThinQ platform that talks about the benefits of global diversification in private markets.
WM: What have been the biggest challenges as you try to connect with advisors and get them to invest in these products?
PA: It kind of relates back to brand recognition. I can tell you that being a global investment firm and a non-U.S.-based investment firm that has roughly two-thirds of its assets invested outside the U.S. has become a huge advantage for us.
As you probably know, in the U.S., most of the private market firms that are based in the U.S. have the majority of their assets invested in the U.S. But advisors and their clients are currently a little bit worried about valuations; they are worried about over-exposure to local markets, and I can tell you that in every conversation I’ve had with an advisor, whether it’s at a wirehouse, or an RIA or a family office, they are looking for diversification.
And it’s not that they don’t want to be invested in the U.S. anymore. That’s not the case at all. In fact, about a third of our investments are in the U.S., and we are looking to double that to about $250 billion over the next five years. We are very bullish on the U.S. However, anyone looking at an asset allocation would be prudent to diversify, and that has been a huge benefit to us.
An expression we use a lot at EQT is “locals with locals.” We have offices in 26 countries around the world, representing more than 80% of global GDP. We have operating teams, investment teams and investment partners in those teams because it’s very important when you are doing a deal in a foreign country, even in different regions within a single country, to understand the rules and regulations and the legal ramifications of how you do a deal. In fact, most of our deals are not done through an auction process. They are done in a negotiated way. The only way to do those deals is to know the local people who will help you, and you’ll get the first call when a deal is being done. It’s a differentiator for us, and when we tell that story to advisors, it really resonates.
The last really important point is exit activity. Over the last several years, the biggest concern investors have had, and not just private wealth investors but also institutional investors, is “I’ve got my money invested in these drawdown structure funds, but I haven’t gotten a return on capital because the firm I am working with hasn’t been able to exit those investments.” If you look at EQT, in the last 12 months, we’ve returned $40 billion of capital to our investors. Where have those distributions come from? Globally. You want to have multiple exit ramps. When the IPO market in the U.S. slows down and you can’t do an IPO in the U.S., guess what? Last year, in India and Hong Kong, the IPO markets were very active, and we had a significant amount of exit activity in APAC and EMEA. When you are invested globally, you have many more geographic opportunities to exit your private market investment than if you are 70% or 80% invested in the United States.
WM: What was EQT’s rationale for the acquisition of Coller Capital? How will it fit into your growth plans in the U.S.?
PA: We are an active investor across private equity, infrastructure and real estate. When we looked at the spectrum of what’s happening in the markets and what our clients are looking for, both institutionally and from a private wealth perspective, what we were missing was access to the secondaries market. If you look at the Coller transaction, it is the world’s largest independent dedicated secondaries firm with roughly $50 billion in AUM.
What’s very attractive is that they not only have private equity secondaries, but they also have a credit secondaries business, which is still relatively new in the world of secondaries. However, given the recent volatility in the private credit space, we think that’s an extremely attractive part of the market to play in. Coller will be sort of a fourth offering for us at EQT in both the private equity secondaries market, as well as private credit secondaries market. We are very excited about that.
This is common knowledge, but if you look at the private equity secondaries market, in 2025, deal volume reached about $226 billion, which was up about 41% from the year before. But when you look at that versus total private equity deal volume, that’s only 2% to 3% of the total. And when you look at the credit side of the secondaries business, it’s even less than that. There is an expansive amount of growth to come in that space, we believe.
WM: And at this point, EQT is only interested in expanding to private credit through secondaries, but not in launching primary private credit strategies?
PA: I don’t really know the answer to that, you’ll have to ask our CEO, but my guess is that it is not one of the primary places we are looking to grow the firm at this stage.
WM: In terms of the evergreen structures EQT is using, does the firm have any plans to try out new types of vehicles in the near future?
PA: For now, those are our flagship strategies, and we are very comfortable with the strategies that we’ve offered. We are always looking at the market to see what clients are looking for, but for right now, those are the ones in the U.S. that we really want to focus on.
There is one thing I would say, and it relates more to our everygreen strategies, but also to our drawdown strategies. Many times, private wealth investors are concerned when they look at these evergreen strategies, that they are not getting the best investments, that they are getting a separate pool of investments. That the institutional investors are getting the grade A investments, and they are getting the B or C investments. From an EQT perspective, whether a client is investing in our evergreen strategies or our drawdown strategies, there is no separate pool of assets for institutional investors and another pool of assets for private wealth investors. Every one of the deals we do is the same. Whether you invest in an evergreen or a drawdown structure, all of those strategies are the same. I think that’s a really important point to make when we talk about EQT as an organization.
