SJP CIO Onuekwusi: Retail investors lack appropriate structure to access private markets

Open-ended structures 'have to work'

St James’s Place’s new chief investment officer Justin Onuekwusi has argued retail investors lack the appropriate structures to access private markets in the open-ended space.

Onuekwusi, who took on his role at the FTSE 100 firm at the start of October, said in a roundtable dinner that the market still needs "to get [its] head around" what an open-ended private markets solution looks like for retail investors and wealth managers. "There is a perception that private assets have become more saturated in the institutional space and now we can just start to move on to retail," he said. "I think that kind of language or argument is very dangerous, because the structures have to work. "When we think about LTAFs and so on, I do not think we are quite there yet in ...