The move highlights how important the private markets area is now for large, mainstream asset management businesses.

Amundi, which a few days ago inked a new partnership with fellow French institution Societe Generale, yesterday said it was also forming a 10-year pact with ICG, a European private markets asset manager.

The alliance is part of a wider pattern of asset managers seeking to extend their private markets capabilities not only to high net worth individuals but also to mass-affluent and retail investors. Earlier in November, for example, Charles Schwab agreed to buy private markets platform Forge Global Holdings for about $600 million. In December 2024, BlackRock launched a private markets platform for wealth investors in Europe, which is also accessible to clients in the Middle East and Asia-Pacific. (The ”evergreen,” or perpetual, model of fund is gaining ground. Blackstone (see here), BNP Paribas Asset Management (see here) and HarbourVest (see here), for example, have also pushed into this area.

“Perpetual” is a term describing a structure of funds that doesn’t come with the drawdowns, capital calls, exit deadlines and other traditional features of private market entities. These “perps” don’t carry the kind of liquidity constraints that might be a problem for investors in more established fund structures.)

Under the terms of the ICG arrangement, Amundi will be the exclusive global distributor in the wealth channel for ICG’s evergreen and certain other products, with ICG becoming Amundi’s exclusive provider of those products to its distribution business. Amundi and ICG will also develop new products targeted at the wealth management segment.

Amundi will take a 9.9 per cent economic stake in ICG, the specific financial size of which was not disclosed.

ICG manages almost $125 billion in assets, mostly for institutional clients, through various strategies across structured capital, private equity secondaries, private debt, credit, and real assets. Amundi has €70 billion ($81 billion) in assets under management in its private markets platform. In 2024, it bolstered these capabilities by acquiring Alpha Associates. In total, Amundi had €2.317 trillion ($2.69 trillion) of assets under management at the end of September.

The partnership will enable more than 200 million individual investors served by Amundi’s worldwide distribution network to access a number of ICG’s private markets strategies through products specifically designed for wealth management and retirement planning.

Evergreen
During the first half of 2026, the firms will initially work on developing two European evergreen funds: a private equity secondaries fund and a private debt fund.

The partnership will also enable Amundi to offer Crédit Agricole Assurances opportunities to diversify and expand its allocation to private assets, notably in private debt.

“This partnership with ICG, a recognised and diversified leader in private markets, represents a remarkable opportunity to offer our distributor clients and the entities and clients of the Crédit Agricole group access to high-performing strategies with proven track records historically reserved for institutional investors,” Valérie Baudson, CEO of Amundi, said.

Societe Generale and fellow French bank Crédit Agricole formed Amundi in 2010.

Some of the increased interest of large asset managers in private markets stems from positive tailwinds from politics. The Trump administration, for example, wants 401(k) retirement savings accounts to hold such assets. In Europe, the ELTIF structure is a way of widening access to the asset class, to give another case.