Private equity has spent a decade buying the companies that serve private equity: the fund administrators, the data shops and the governance and compliance firms that sit behind every capital call. Permira has been one of the busiest buyers. Now it has hired one of the best-known operators in financial data to help it buy more.
Douglas Peterson, who ran S&P Global for more than a decade, has joined Permira’s services sector team as a senior adviser based in New York, Venture & Equity reported. He will advise portfolio-company management teams on value-creation plans and help the services team with due diligence and portfolio strategy.
The résumé
Peterson’s tenure at S&P Global included the acquisition and integration of IHS Markit in 2022. Over his decade at the top, the company’s market capitalization grew from $16 billion to more than $150 billion, according to Venture & Equity. Before that, he spent 26 years at Citigroup, where his roles included chief operating officer of Citibank, chief executive of Citigroup Japan and chief auditor. He sits on the boards of Morgan Stanley, the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Japan Society and Claremont McKenna College.
Permira’s co-chief executives, Dipan Patel and Brian Ruder, framed the hire as a thesis, not just a name. “Private markets are institutionalising fast, and value is accruing to the infrastructure it’s built on,” they said. “Fund services, governance, data and analytics are long-time thematics for our Services sector team.”
The portfolio backs that up. Permira funds have invested over the past ten years in Alter Domus, Carne Group, JTC, Octus, Clearwater Analytics, Acuity Analytics, Kroll and Tricor. Octus, the New York credit-intelligence firm, is the one readers may recognize: the London Stock Exchange Group has agreed to buy it for about $3.5 billion.
“Doug ran S&P Global for more than a decade and fundamentally reshaped it along the way,” said Daniel Brenhouse and Philip Muelder, the partners who co-head Permira’s services group. “He knows what it takes to grow a data and financial services franchise across markets, through cycles and through a major integration, and he understands the regulatory and client dynamics that define this sector.”
Peterson said he sees “enormous opportunity” in helping such businesses grow.
Why it matters
The logic is straightforward. As pension funds and endowments demand more reporting, and as regulators pay closer attention to private funds, the back office becomes a growth business with recurring revenue. A former S&P chief knows how ratings, indexes and data are sold to institutions that cannot afford to stop buying them. That is close to the business model Permira is betting on.
The skeptic’s question is valuation. When every large sponsor wants the same kind of asset, the price of fund administrators and data businesses rises, and the next buyer has to believe the growth will continue. Senior advisers with famous names are also a familiar feature of private equity. Their value shows up, if it does, in deals and exits years later.
Elsewhere in the seats
TowerBrook. TowerBrook Capital Partners has named Matt Ross a managing director and head of its Structured Opportunities strategy in the United States, based in New York. The strategy provides flexible capital to management teams outside a traditional buyout. It launched in 2015 and has made 32 investments. Ross joins from One Investment Management, where he was a partner and head of U.S. corporate investing. Before that he was a managing director in KKR’s Strategic Investments Group, and he has held investment roles at Venor Capital Management and Centerbridge Partners. He began his career in Blackstone’s restructuring group.
ATL Partners. The New York private-equity firm ATL Partners has hired Melissa Imperiale as head of investor relations and marketing, according to Preqin’s weekly people-moves report. She was previously a vice president in investor relations and fundraising at Lindsay Goldberg.
Eagle Point. Eagle Point Credit Management has hired Sarah Meehan as head of corporate communications after 16 years at Bridgewater Associates, where she was most recently deputy head of external communications and affairs, Preqin reported.
The private-funds bar. The lawyers who paper these deals are moving too. Freshfields has added Brett Bush, a private-funds and secondaries lawyer who was counsel at Debevoise & Plimpton, as a partner in New York. The firm says he is its 11th strategic U.S. partner addition this year. White & Case has hired Simone Greenspan, who represents private-equity and growth-equity sponsors, as a partner in New York from Goodwin Procter. Goodwin, for its part, is bringing in Thomas Henry from Weil, Gotshal & Manges to co-lead its real estate industry group in New York, Preqin reported.
What to watch
The Peterson hire will be judged by what Permira buys next in fund services and financial data, and by whether a former public-company chief ends up in a chairman’s seat at one of those companies. The broader pattern in recent hires, firms adding people for structured capital, investor relations and communications, says something about the market itself. Raising money and finding flexible ways to deploy it have become as important as the buyouts.
Featured image: Douglas Peterson, the former S&P Global chief executive who has joined Permira as a New York-based senior adviser. Photo by S&P Global (photographer Rick Schwab) via Wikimedia Commons, GFDL.
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