Crossinvest Seeks To Break Down Barriers To Private Asset Investing

Tom Burroughes

30 May 2017

[tag|Crossinvest (Asia)|]Crossinvest (Asia), which is based in Singapore, has built out an offering giving clients access to investment in private assets. The firm has partnered with Australia’s Revolver Capital to bring this proposition to Asia.

The Crossinvest Private Access offering will source the private assets through the world’s major innovation centres: US, Israel, UK, Australia and Singapore. These assets will be assessed by the Crossinvest team against various internal filters such as relative growth stages, sector, geography, founder team and type of lead investors, competition and disruption elements, risks and underlying correlation within the existing investments.

It has until recently been difficult for individuals and family offices to get access to firms before they float on the stock market. For years, the only route was to invest in private equity funds offered through banks or other channels, and often coming with high fees, Crossinvest said in a statement.

The move fits with Crossinvest's championing of private asset investing, as shown in a number of guest contributions by that firm to WealthBriefingAsia's editorial pages in recent months. For an example, see here.

The new service is available to any client of Crossinvest, including its partners across the Asian wealth industry, it said.

"Our Private Access portfolios will follow the same timeless principles of investing and allocation methodologies that private banks and wealth managers have been applying for decades. We believe that the principles of asset allocation, diversification (across geographies, sectors, assets and growth stages) and risk management methodologies must apply to the private unlisted space just the same way as we would apply these methodologies to any investment portfoliom," Rohit Bhuta, Crossinvest chief executive, said.

"But the reality of today’s financial markets is that investors are missing out on entire sectors of the global economy because they are not able to directly invest in pre-IPO companies," he said.

Craig Swanger, chief investment ifficer at Revolver said, said of the partnership: "We believe that our clients should build a portfolio of private assets over a two-, three-year period.

Our focus is to build the portfolio over time to ensure that the private assets portfolio has in excess of 20 - 30 investments across sectors, growth stages, themes and geographies.

“The service is currently focusing on investments in data management services, ‘the infrastructure of the digital economy’, including cybersecurity technologies. Just prior to the recent WannaCry global cyber-attack we secured an allocation to an early stage investment in this sector, a timely opportunity for our clients," he added.
Operating in Asia since 2005, Crossinvest was born out of a single family office in Swizerland in 1985.