Great Gray Group LLC, the parent company of collective investment trust provider Great Gray Trust Co. LLC, announced an agreement with iCapital to develop a suite of private market asset-class-specific CITs.
Great Gray will establish the CITs, serve as trustee, maintain fiduciary authority over investments in the trusts and oversee servicing, according to the announcement. iCapital will serve as Great Gray’s “preferred partner” for private markets manager evaluation, due diligence and portfolio construction.
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“As private markets [begin] to play a much larger role in [providing] a diversified defined contribution portfolio, we wanted to partner with an industry-leading firm,” says Rob Barnett, Great Gray Group’s president and CEO. Great Gray chose iCapital, Barnett says, for its promise to help educate advisers—who in turn educate plan sponsors—about “the need for private markets in retirement.”
iCapital Chair and CEO Lawrence Calcano adds that, “before you even get to the underlying clients, participants, advisers need to be well-educated,” describing education as a “cornerstone of the investments we’ve made to try to help advisers help their clients make the right decisions.”
The firms plan to incorporate private equity, private credit and private real assets into the vehicles. The capabilities embedded within the CITs will support liquidity management, manager selection, portfolio construction and ongoing oversight.
Several other financial services firms have recently announced plans to launch CITs intended to provide defined contribution participants with access to private market investments.
On September 1, Constitution Capital Partners launched the Constitutional Capital Horizon CIT, which invests in private equity, while on August 26, Principal Financial Group announced the expansion of its Preferred Partners Program into private markets, including the development of a CIT series to be released in the first quarter of 2027.
In August, SEI Investments Co. and WTW Investments, a division of WTW, announced a partnership to develop private market funds available through CITs. Voya launched two multi-manager alternative CITs for DC plans in June, and PGIM launched a private credit CIT in May.
Last November, the Great Gray Group announced the purchase of CIT fund sub-advisory business assets from flexPATH Strategies LLC. Great Gray Trust Co. serves as a trustee of those trusts and took over the investment management of the assets, which had been provided by flexPATH. Great Gray had been trustee of the flexPATH sub-advised CITs since the trusts were created more than 10 years ago.
Great Gray’s flexPATH glide path framework held more than $130 billion in assets of June 30. As of the same date, Great Gray had more than $371.8 billion in fund assets.
