As part of my frontier finance research project, I’ve been doing quite a bit of work on the impediments to pension and sovereign wealth fund collaboration and co-investment. As frequent – and probably even occasional readers – of this blog know, I tend to go on and on about pension fund collaboration, cooperation and co-investment and their potential benefits. Why? Because the economic geographer in me is convinced that like-minded, frontier investors should be sharing networks, resources and even deals. These are funds that currently try to in-source a variety of asset classes, and some are struggling to do so effectively. A community of like-minded investors could surely help in this regard.
But it’s not really happening (yet). And I am beginning to understand more and more why this is the case. The factors constraining peer-to-peer collaboration and co-investing seem to be of five types:
So while the benefits of collaboration and co-investment among peers seems clear, the impediments are equally serious. But I remain optimistic. Why? Because now that we know the problems, we can start working on solutions. And that’s what I’ve been doing...
