Rashmi Madan

Spear’s Review

A Tennessee-bred banker who moved to London in 1999, Blackstone’s Private Wealth Solutions boss in charge of the EMEA region is on a mission to ‘educate’ private bankers on the art of private equity. Illiquidity isn’t such a bad thing, we learn, over coffee at the asset manager’s new offices at Berkeley House.

She observes that UK bankers trade private funds on an exchange, ‘because they need daily liquidity’. But doing this can be damaging to portfolios, particularly those which are focused on growth. ‘As soon as you start trading private markets on an exchange, it acts like a public market,’ she says, adding that the alternative assets will not give investors the benefits of diversification since they will not be protected from public market volatility.

But things are different at Blackstone, she emphasises. ‘We provide the liquidity, not the market.’ Liquidity is available monthly, at net asset value, but at a 2 per cent cap on each fund. ‘Historically, [daily] liquidity has been something that the regulators have promoted as being less risky, which makes no sense.’

Madan joined Blackstone in 2011 after serving as an executive director at London’s JP Morgan offices for more than eight years. She started off as a senior managing director and the COO of Blackstone’s institutional arm focusing on Europe. During this tenure, she promoted five women to managing director roles within the company. ‘That was huge,’ she recalls. She is particularly proud of one colleague with whom she’s worked for 17 years, during which Madan helped her grow from intern to analyst to managing director and eventually taking on her role. At this juncture, Madan was appointed head of the EMEA private wealth arm in 2021. Her role was to ‘build out’ the private wealth business in Europe to replicate Blackstone’s US framework, with offices in Paris, Zurich, Frankfurt and Milan. 

Blackstone, the world’s largest asset manager, offers access to institutional funds for individuals via its private banking partners, which includes BNP Paribas, UBS and Credit Suisse. Its most popular products are the $69 billion real estate fund (BREIT) and the $50.1 billion private credit fund (BCRED). Recent statistics show that the credit fund has a total return of 7.9 per cent while the real estate fund has a 16 per cent yield over a three-year period.