Money managers from Apollo to BlackRock are scrambling to capitalize on investors’ demand for private markets. Here are 16 people leading that push.

• Asset-management firms are broadly ramping up alternative-investment distribution efforts.
• Increasingly, private markets are also on regulators’ radars as investors flock to them.
• Insider has pinpointed key leaders pushing asset managers’ alternatives products to clients.
• See more stories on Insider’s business page.

Investors are flocking to the growing, often opaque world of private markets. Asset managers, under pressure to find new revenue sources and tap into flashy companies staying private for longer, are sprinting to help them get there.

Firms are increasingly focused on getting their alternative investments, namely private equity and credit, out to wealth-management firms, financial advisors, and their clients.

“As efforts to serve the retail base pick up, we anticipate that there will be a race among asset managers to solidify manufacturing and distribution capabilities in the private markets,” partners at Boston Consulting Group said in a report last week.

It’s no wonder. Private-markets investment strategies are the fastest growing of any revenue segment in the industry, projected to generate 32% of global industry revenue by the end of 2024, up from 28% at the end of 2019, indicated data released last month from Deloitte’s Casey Quirk unit.

They generally cost clients more in management fees than traditional products tracking public equity and debt markets, and in some cases alternative investments generate higher returns. McKinsey said in a report this spring that, “by nearly any measure,” private equity has continued to outperform public-market equivalents.

Firms are now creating new roles and adding new capabilities in an effort to keep up with client demand and heightened competition for alternatives, such as hedge funds, real estate, infrastructure, and private markets.

Virtually every major money manager is carrying out plans to grow in that space. BlackRock has named alternatives as a key growth area. In May, Apollo Global Management formed a unit to sell more of its products to wealth managers and individual investors. That month, Pimco hired executives from Blackstone and Wells Fargo to lead similar efforts. In June, T. Rowe Price poached a Pimco executive to oversee alternatives distribution. Blackstone created two new roles in Europe to promote new relationships with Swiss and French private-wealth managers. And KKR’s private-wealth team has tripled in size over the past year.

Regulators are also taking note as the space grows. Commissioner Caroline Crenshaw raised concerns in a Securities and Exchange Commission meeting last week about the lack of visibility in private markets.

“I want to understand what the benefits, risks, and costs of investing in the private markets are, and I want to see the data behind those benefits, risks, and costs,” she said.

With more asset managers looking to push into the private markets and wider alternatives space, Insider has pinpointed the most prominent leaders who are responsible for connecting investors with those products.