Campbell Lutyens and JPMorgan enter into ‘strategic collaboration’ for continuation funds

The offering will combine JPMorgan’s investment banking services and Campbell Lutyens’ global placement and secondaries advisory platform, the two firms tell Secondaries Investor.

Campbell Lutyens and JPMorgan have entered into a strategic collaboration to jointly advise on single-asset and concentrated multi-asset continuation fund transactions.

The offering will combine JPMorgan’s investment banking services and Campbell Lutyens’ global placement and secondaries advisory platform.

While most of the deals it has worked on over the years have been done on a sole basis, Campbell Lutyens has also teamed with a range of investment banks in the past, including JPMorgan. Because single-asset continuation funds are more concentrated, the level of industry expertise required is greater, Campbell Lutyens CEO Andrew Sealey told Secondaries Investor.

“If you were doing a transaction in the consumer sector, for example, we’ll basically have access to the best industry bankers at JPMorgan, which enhances the offering to our clients,” Sealey explained.

The collaboration also offers up JPMorgan’s M&A expertise to Campbell Lutyens clients, in addition to a broad range of other services, including fairness opinions, corporate-level strategic advice and debt capital markets expertise, he added.

“For us, we see this as getting the best of both worlds – preserving our independence and all the things we enjoy about being a smaller firm, but [having] access to a formidable global investment bank and all the benefits that come with that,” Sealey said.

JPMorgan saw that continuation funds would become a more important alternative exit or reinvesting option for its GP clients during the pandemic, Carsten Woehrn, JPMorgan’s head of financial sponsors M&A for EMEA, told Secondaries Investor.

After trying to build out a team organically, JPMorgan felt adding just one person was not enough given the need for strong relationships with heads of investor relations at the GPs, as well as institutional investors in the secondaries space. Other investment banks have also had revolving doors when it comes to secondaries talent, he said. A collaboration with Campbell Lutyens “was just like the glove that fits the hand”.

The firms have a couple of joint mandates in the works across private equity and infrastructure, Woehrn said.

Both firms have identified the right counterparts regionally to point people moving forward, Woehrn said. Both Woehrn and Sealey said no further infrastructure has been put in place beyond that.

There also is not any financial linkage other than a broad agreement on how the firms will approach these transactions and how they might charge for their services, Sealey said.

“The difference is that we will offer this joint service in a seamless way through one relationship. We’ll be very familiar with working with each other – it will be very smooth offering to the client – rather than getting two different advisers who haven’t worked together, who may have different interests,” Sealey said.

“Hopefully our clients will really see that, because we are one team and it’s going to be… one trusted relationship going forward that they can discuss anything. [There will be] full confidence, which is so important in these transactions because it touches the LPs, it touches a lot of people, and sometimes [it touches] quite some sensitive topics,” Woehrn added.