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Portfolio Advisors taps Greenhill for Europe secondaries head

The appointment comes almost a year after the former head of Greenhill's secondaries advisory team, Stephen Sloan, joined the firm help launch a GP-led strategy.

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Another managing director has left Greenhill, following the departure of most of its secondaries advisory team last year.

Briac Houtteville, the investment bank’s co-head of European Capital Advisory, is to join Portfolio Advisors, according to a statement. He will become European head of secondaries and work alongside former Greenhill colleagues Stephen Sloan, Brian Mooney and Michael Song, who moved to the Connecticut-headquartered secondaries firm in autumn last year.

“Over the past 25 years, Portfolio Advisors has built a global secondaries investment platform and differentiated ourselves as leaders in the middle market,” managing partner Brian Murphy said in the statement. “As we continue to expand our secondary business and products globally, we will leverage Briac’s leadership, relationships and investment experience.”

Houtteville was at Greenhill for 12 years and worked on approximately $35 billion of secondaries transactions during that time, the statement noted.

In September, managing directors Brenlen Jinkens and Scott Beckelman left Greenhill to form a secondaries advisory business at Jefferies, Secondaries Investor reported. They were joined by managing directors Todd Miller, Andy Nick and Chris Bonfield in October.

Co-head of European Capital Advisory Bernhard Engelien remains with Greenhill.

In May, Portfolio Advisors held a $1.7 billion interim close on its fourth secondaries fund. Limited partners include Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, which committed $150 million, and Missouri Local Government Employees’ Retirement System, which committed $65 million, according to Secondaries Investor data. The firm is also in market with a fund dedicated to GP-led deals.

In November last year, Greenhill’s chief executive Scott Bok said in an earnings call that the firm would rebuild its secondaries advisory unit around GP-led deals: “They tend to be very tailored, very complex and, frankly, just like in the M&A and restructuring world, the more complicated the things are that you work on, it tends to be the higher fees that you end up earning.”