MILAN (Reuters) -Italian bank UniCredit said on Wednesday it was widening its partnership with Blackstone (NYSE:BX) to start offering its wealthier clients a private equity fund, an asset class normally reserved for professional investors.
UniCredit first partnered with the world's largest alternative asset manager in July last year, by making Blackstone's European private credit fund available to clients of its wealth management business.
UniCredit said it would now also offer its customers the Blackstone Private Equity Strategies Fund (BXPE), an actively managed, semi-liquid, open-ended alternative investment fund.
The new fund requires a minimum investment of 100,000 euros ($105,000).
Under Italian rules, alternative investments such as this can account at most for 10% of an individual's overall wealth under management, so to invest in it a person would need to have at least 1 million euros in wealth under management.
Normally private equity investments are carried out through close-ended funds which repay contributors only after a number of years.
The BXPE allows non-professional investors to get exposure to Blackstone's private equity investments.
"We have already observed significant interest from individual investors in Italy looking to diversify their investment portfolios into asset classes that were once exclusive to institutional investors," Andrea Valeri, chairman of Blackstone Italy, said in a statement.
Drawing on his long experience at Swiss bank UBS, UniCredit CEO Andrea Orcel has focused UniCredit's business on fee-earning activities such as wealth management that minimise the level of capital that banks are obliged to set aside against their assets.
Speaking at a banking conference in London last month, Orcel said the bank had since he arrived in 2021 worked to move away from mass market clients towards "private and affluent".
In an effort to fend off rising competition from cheaper, passive investments, wealth managers have been increasingly turning to niche products with higher fees for customers and expanding their offering of illiquid investments outside public markets. ($1 = 0.9546 euros)