The New York City-based role has been created to help iCapital build on its brand within HNW circles and educate the private equity community on the unique needs of this significant investor audience.

iCapital Network, which describes itself as an online marketplace, has brought in industry expert Hannah Shaw Grove as senior vice president and chief marketing officer.                 

Grove has over two decades of experience as a family office consultant and private wealth strategist as well as a marketer, author and media personality, iCapital Network said.

Before founding her consultancy in 2006, Grove spent 16 years in investment management in leadership roles at Merrill Lynch & Co, Prudential and Fidelity Investments, among others.

She is a member of the Hedge Fund Association’s High Net Worth Advisory Board and the former chair of the Investment Company Institute’s Research Committee.  

“High net worth investors and their advisors have never had a private equity resource that offers the kind of access and analytical power of the iCapital Network platform,” said Grove. “I am excited to join the iCapital team and begin working to elevate its bold vision of leveraging technology to deliver institutional-quality tools and engage with the high-end of the market.”

iCapital Network provides qualified investors and their advisors with access to private equity fund managers.

Family Wealth Report spoke to the firm last year about how, while equity and bond markets have been disrupted by the implementation of technology-based trading platforms, private equity is the one market that has yet to adopt technology platforms to disseminate information and/or automate the investment process.

“This will change in keeping with the paradigm that has developed in other areas of the financial markets,” the firm said.

iCapital noted that the top 300 RIA firms with a minimum of $300 million in AuM and no broker-dealer affiliation have $850 billion under management in aggregate.

“This is our target group. The independent RIA market place has grown rapidly since the financial crisis in 2008 which triggered a mass exodus of financial advisors from Wall Street,” the firm told this publication. “The RIA community today has less than a 2 per cent allocation to private equity, while the average allocation for the top 10 US endowments is 20 per cent. Most RIAs have limited access to top performing general partners and, when they do have access, it is often based on personal relationships – so highly episodic.”

See more here.