Lean, Bespoke, Targeted: The Rise And Rise Of Right-Sized Structures

The private capital industry today bears a quiet but consequential burden. The regulatory architecture that underpins the industry was built for a different era, in response to a specific problem. Sophisticated investors are increasingly unwilling to suffer in silence. 

Cast your mind back beyond today's geo-politics to a time when a global financial crisis seemed the most consequential problem we'd have to face in our lifetimes. The post-2008 regulatory approach to fund management was, by design, a retail protection project. AIFMD, supervised fund regimes, the full weight of depositary requirements, prescribed governance structures and lengthy authorisation timelines were geared above all to contain systemic risk and shield ordinary investors from complexity they were deemed unable to bear. We do not dispute that these remain legitimate objectives – sometimes. The problem is that these frameworks have been applied indiscriminately and the same scaffolding can now constrain