Access Capital holds first close on latest FoF

The Paris-headquartered investment manager is seeking €700m for its eighth lower-market funds of funds, 40% of which will go to secondaries.

Access Capital Partners’s flagship fund of funds vehicle is approaching the 60 percent raised mark.

The Paris-headquartered investment manager has raised €412 million for Access Capital Fund VIII Growth Buy-out Europe out of a target of €700 million, according to a statement.

Similar to its predecessors, Fund VIII will target smaller European buyout funds that employ buy-and-build strategies and employ low levels of leverage, the statement noted.

Secondaries transactions can account for up to 40 percent of the fund’s investments.

The 2016-vintage ACF VII held its final close in December on €768 million, above its target of €500 million, after two years in market. Wales’s Clwyd Pension Fund was among the investors in the fund, according to PEI data.

Speaking to Secondaries Investor in April, partner Alexandre Delos said that high pricing had stopped the firm from launching dedicated secondaries vehicles.

“We’ve always used secondaries opportunistically as an adjustment variable to the market, and thanks to that non-obligation to deploy capital, we can decide to do more or less, depending on the market cycles,” Delos said.

Access has been an active secondaries seller, offloading three portfolios in the past two years. In 2017 it sold a portfolio of 17 European mid-market stakes to Finnish investment firm eQ Asset Management, Secondaries Investor reported. eQ placed the portfolio in a third-party fund structure and opened it up to investors such as the Finnish State Pension Fund.

European funds accounted for 17 percent of deal volume by number last year, according to research by Greenhill.