Brookfield Asset Management Ltd. is in talks to take over the private equity secondaries business of Deutsche Bank AG’s asset management arm, according to a person familiar with the matter.
Negotiations are in final stages and a deal may get announced as soon as this week, said the person, who requested anonymity because the matter is still private.
Deutsche Bank’s DWS Group has been pitching its secondaries business, which raised an initial US$550 million fund just over a year ago, to interested parties as part of a plan to pull back from areas where it doesn’t have sufficient scale, Bloomberg reported in December. Representatives for Brookfield and DWS declined to comment.
The secondaries market is a corner of the private equity business that includes investors looking to unload private assets, and fund managers seeking to boost ownership stakes or hold assets for longer. It has grown in recent years as a way to improve liquidity in private markets, with deal volumes of US$53 billion in the first half of 2022.
Brookfield got into the secondaries market two years ago through its real estate business with the launch of an US$875 million fund, according to Pitchbook, followed by its infrastructure unit, which also launched a secondaries strategy. Brookfield Chief Executive Officer Bruce Flatt said in 2020 that secondaries could eventually become a US$50 billion business for the firm.
The proposed sale of DWS’s secondaries business comes as the asset manager tries to move resources to other parts of the firm. DWS is trying to grow its alternatives business, which includes real estate, infrastructure and private debt. As part of its plans to grow that franchise, DWS hired Paul Kelly from Blackstone as global head of alternatives.
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