As part of its continued push into the private wealth channel, alternative asset behemoth Blackstone has tapped Jennifer Abate as a senior managing director and head of the RIA channel for its Blackstone Private Wealth division. It’s a new role for the company.
Abate will be responsible for setting the RIA channel’s strategy, as well as leading its home office coverage and sales. She will lead a distribution team across Blackstone offices in Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Columbus, Dallas, Denver, Houston, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Miami, San Francisco/Bay Area and Tampa and report to Joe Lohrer, head of Americas sales for Blackstone Private Wealth.
“The scale and track-record of Blackstone’s platform, across private equity, private real estate, private credit and infrastructure, means it is a one-stop-shop for private markets for advisors and the investors they serve,” Abate said in a statment.
Abate joins from Lazard Asset Management, where she spent over 30 years and last served as managing director responsible for building and leading the financial institutions group.
“As we continue our mission to bring institutional-quality investing to individual investors via their advisors, RIAs are a key channel for us to broaden our reach,” Lohrer said in a statement. “We see strong demand from individual investors to gain exposure to private markets with Blackstone, and Jen’s experience and expertise means we are well-equipped to capture the tremendous opportunities we see in this space.”
Blackstone currently has $271 billion under management in the private wealth channel globally and a team of more than 300 solely focused on wealth.
It operates several limited liquidity vehicles, including Blackstone REIT, a non-traded REIT with more than $100 billion assets across property types, and BCRED, a private credit a non-traded BDC with about $70 billion in assets. It also operates BXPE, a perpetual fund that focuses on private equity investments. Last week, Blackstone also launched Blackstone Private Multi-Asset Credit and Income Fund (BMACX), the firm’s first private multi-asset credit interval fund.
In addition, the firm recently announced a partnership with Vanguard and Wellington Management that plans to offer multi-asset portfolios blending private and public assets, although the firms have not yet outlined what form the portfolios will take.