KKR isn’t new to private wealth, said Doug Krupa, managing director and head of global wealth solutions at KKR, at the Pershing Insite conference. He said the firm has been in the private wealth market for the past 15 years. What is new is that the company has built a suite of products across its asset classes—private equity, private infrastructure, private real estate and more—to make alternatives more digestible for advisors and their clients.
“Private wealth has become one of those strategic initiatives because institutional asset bases are sort of contracting," Krupa said. “New pension plans aren’t being created. They might still be growing with the market, but much more of private wealth is self-directed. It’s not professionally managed anymore. It’s with advisors, it’s with fiduciaries and we really want to level that playing field, give them the same tools.”
He said those tools still aren't "point and click," but that’s one of the last pain points in making alternatives more accessible.
“Everything is still available in sort of a digital subscription document. There’s more uniformity across subscription documents, but it's still not point and click,” he said. "Hopefully there's a solution down the road—could be a digital ledger—could be the fact that maybe we get these products available more point and click. That's the last mile we're still navigating.”