The CAIS platform is part of a trend of organizations being set up to make it easier for HNW investors to tap into alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity.

CAIS
CAIS, an alternative assets investment platform for independent financial advisors, is partnering with Graham Capital Management. 

Graham, founded in 1994, specializes in providing quantitative and discretionary macro strategies, and oversees about $17.9 billion in assets under management.

The Graham fund listed by CAIS has gone through a third-party due diligence process conducted by Mercer and will be made available to RIAs and independent broker-dealers. In addition, Graham will gain access to CAIS’ Asset Manager Experience, a dashboard providing product interest and investor pipeline from advisors using the CAIS Marketplace.

A recent CAIS-Mercer survey found that nearly 88 per cent of financial advisors intend to increase their allocations to alternatives over the next two years, signaling a rising demand for alternatives asset classes amid a backdrop of one of the lowest annual performances of the 60/40 portfolio over the last two decades.

Founded in 2009, CAIS empowers more than 8,300 advisor firms/teams who oversee more than $3 trillion in network assets. It has offices in New York, Los Angeles, Austin, San Francisco, and London.

Coller Capital 
Coller Capital, the London-headquartered group, has created its global private wealth secondaries solutions business.

(“Secondaries” refer to transactions in which an investor is buying an existing interest or asset from primary private equity fund investors, known as limited partners.)

PWSS will build on Coller’s global relationships with private banks, wealth managers and investment advisors to distribute the products it creates and manages for this channel. The unit will be led by Jake Elmhirst, who joined Coller Capital as a partner in the investor relations team in 2022. Elmhirst spent 25 years at UBS, most recently leading its private markets effort within the Swiss bank’s global wealth management arm and, prior to that, UBS Investment Bank’s Private Funds Group.

Within the PWSS team, Elmhirst is joined by two Coller Capital investment team members: Jon Freeman, a partner in the CIO Office with 26 years’ service; and Mark Hindriks, who has been with Coller for 13 years. Hendriks will become the chief operating officer of PWSS. 

In the US, product distribution will be led by co-heads of PWSS Distribution, Jonathan McEvoy, formerly with Morgan Stanley, and Alana Montanari, formerly with Ironwood Capital Management, with support from Daniel Murphy who joined from Bank of America Merrill.

Besides its London HQ, Coller has offices in New York, Hong Kong and Seoul. The firm oversees $27.5 billion assets under management.