LPs

Chappuis To Speed Carlyle Custom Accounts

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  • New executive from Morgan Stanley
  • Separate accounts have proliferated
  • Carlyle lags key rivals in area

Chappuis, who starts in May, will join from Morgan Stanley, where he expanded that firm’s fund of funds business to include all manner of alternative investments, including hedge funds, private equity and real estate.

The move to hire Chappuis aims to help Carlyle accelerate its ability to offer customized managed accounts, funds-of-funds and other alternative investment products to a wider investor base. Carlyle, for instance, has yet to form the kind of $1 billion-plus separate account partnerships with public pension funds that rivals Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co., Apollo Global Management and The Blackstone Group already have established.

David Rubenstein, Carlyle’s co-founder, speaking at the SuperReturn private equity conference in Berlin, said that separate accounts have “proliferated in the industry in the last couple of years, and there is no doubt that all the large firms like ours are talking to people about managed accounts. We already have some and I suspect that we’ll have more.”

Chappuis added in a release that the “demand for investment product customization and specialization increases by the day,” adding that he is “eager to harness the power of the Carlyle brand and team to develop and innovate for Carlyle’s investors.”

It is not yet clear whether a new suite of funds of funds that Carlyle is likely to offer will carry the Carlyle name, the AlpInvest name or an entirely new brand, but the firm has indicated that it intends to maintain a high wall around AlpInvest to protect the independence of its investment decisions. One senior AlpInvest executive attending the SuperReturn conference in Berlin was not aware of the new appointment or that it would essentially place his unit under a new manager.

AlpInvest, as a majority-owned partner of Carlyle, has been slow to develop new funds of funds and expand its client base beyond Holland’s two largest pension fund managers, APG and PGGM, which created AlpInvest in 1999 as a separate company to manage their private equity assets. AlpInvest currently manages roughly $45 billion in private equity assets. Carlyle bought its stake in AlpInvest in 2011.