The Private Markets Retail Playbook: Same Product, Different Wrapper

What's New

Brookfield Asset Management CEO Connor Teskey and Invesco President and CEO Andrew Schlossberg sat down together at Bloomberg Invest 2026 to argue a deceptively simple thesis: bringing private markets to individual investors does not require changing what you invest in or how you invest it. The investment discipline is identical. What changes is the packaging, the structure, the distribution channel, and critically the depth and quality of investor education. Both leaders were measured and long-term in their framing, treating the current BDC redemption headlines as a short-term stress test rather than a structural threat to the democratization trend.

Why It Matters

The individual investor market, spanning wealth, insurance, annuities, and defined contribution, is roughly twice the size of the institutional market globally, yet remains barely penetrated by private markets allocations. That gap is the largest single growth opportunity in asset management over the next decade. Unlocking it requires solving liquidity structure, suitability rigor, and investor education simultaneously. The current moment of market stress is, in both leaders' framing, the necessary friction that will separate well-built vehicles from those that expanded faster than their operational infrastructure could support.

Big Picture Drivers

• Identical investment discipline: Neither Brookfield nor Invesco changes its underlying investment approach when crossing from institutional to individual channels. The exposure is the same. The wrapper and distribution model are not.

• Partnership as strategy: Invesco's partnerships with Barings and LGT reflect a deliberate decision to stay focused on core competencies in real assets and alternative credit while partnering for capabilities, such as private equity and secondaries, where specialist expertise is genuinely superior.

• Education as infrastructure: Both CEOs identified investor education not as a marketing function but as a core operational capability requiring dedicated, growing, global teams that explain when a product may not be suitable as well as when it is.

• DC as the next wave: Defined contribution and retirement plans represent a potentially larger long-term opportunity than the wealth channel, and both firms are actively building product and operational infrastructure to serve it.

• Friction reduction: One of the biggest barriers to individual investor adoption is not product quality but operational friction, slow subscription processes, difficulty integrating private assets alongside public holdings, and unclear liquidity communication.

By The Numbers

• 2x the size of the institutional market: the individual investor market globally spanning wealth, insurance, and DC

• $130B Invesco's current private markets asset base

• 30 years Invesco's tenure in private real estate and alternative credit, the foundation of its institutional credibility

• 15% approximate current allocation to private markets in well-positioned institutional portfolios, versus low single digits for most individual investors

• 0 to 3% typical current individual investor allocation to private markets, with long-term potential to reach 15%

Key Trends to Watch

• Perpetual vehicle management discipline will become a key differentiator as the industry stress-tests which firms built these structures with appropriate liquidity buffers and incremental inflow management.

• ETF innovation in private markets is nascent but real, with the public-to-private and private-to-public spectrum blurring, though both leaders agreed it is not the immediate priority for the wealth channel.

• Defined contribution infrastructure is being actively built by firms like Invesco and Voya, with professionally managed target date and multi-strategy wrappers serving as the most appropriate initial delivery mechanism.

• Consolidation pressure will continue to favor larger institutions that can invest in the compliance, reporting, and client service infrastructure required to meet rising regulatory and adviser standards.

Memorable Quotes

• "It's not simply about getting your product on the shelf. It's getting the product on the shelf and then explaining the product and why it might work, but equally why it might not work for someone." Teskey on education as a genuine two-way responsibility. The distinction between selling and educating is the difference between a sustainable individual market and one that produces the exact redemption pressure currently playing out.

• "In almost all cases we are not changing what we invest or how we invest it. We are simply packaging it and structuring it differently for a different end investor." The clearest possible articulation of the institutional-to-individual thesis. The product is not being diluted. The delivery mechanism is being redesigned.

• "Essentially all investing around the world is on behalf of individuals. When we invest on behalf of a pension fund or a sovereign wealth fund, it's individuals behind that institution that are in fact the end stakeholder." Teskey reframing the institutional versus individual debate as a false dichotomy. The distinction is intermediary, not economic. The end beneficiary is always a person.

The Wrap

The democratization of private markets is not a short-term trade or a fundraising strategy. It is a structural multi-decade shift driven by a genuine supply and demand imbalance between where private market returns live and where individual capital sits today. The firms that will win this shift are not those that move fastest to shelf, but those that build the education infrastructure, the distribution relationships, and the operational discipline to deliver private markets to individuals in a way that survives its first serious market stress test. That test is happening right now.