EDHEC INFRASTRUCTURE AND PRIVATE ASSETS Day
RESEARCH. PRACTICE. PRIVATE MARKETS.Taking place on 8 December in London, the event will bring together leading academics, institutional investors and industry experts to discuss the latest research and developments shaping private markets.
From the practical realities of valuing private investments and navigating regulatory requirements, to applying the Total Portfolio Approach across portfolios that include unlisted assets, the programme explores the challenges of making robust investment decisions in increasingly complex markets.
The conference will also showcase the latest research and developments in private debt and private equity, alongside perspectives on infrastructure investment and portfolio construction. Together, these sessions offer a timely look at how investors can better understand, value and integrate private assets within diversified portfolios.
Agenda
8.30 – 9.15 | Registration & Welcome Coffee
9.15 – 10.00 | Opening session
Speaker: Tim Whittaker, Director, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute.
10.00 - 10.45 | Valuing private assets: the real-world challenges versus what the rules prescribe
- Regulatory convergence: How seven supervisory regimes have shifted valuation from a model-selection problem to a governance one — independence, revaluation triggers and error remediation.
- Rules versus practice: Evidence from practitioners across multiple jurisdictions shows the prescribed architecture is in place everywhere and produces materially different outcomes at each firm.
- Valuing private assets: How preparers navigate between the accounting standard, the industry guidelines and their own internal frameworks when the asset has no observable price.
Speaker: Demi Chung, PhD, Senior Researcher, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute
10.45 – 11.15 | Morning Break
11.15 – 12.00 | From climate risk to asset value: infrastructure debt and equity
Measuring the Financial Impact of Climate Risk on Infrastructure Debt and Equity
- Climate scenarios & asset value: How different climate scenarios translate into financial impacts on infrastructure assets.
- Equity vs. debt: Preliminary findings show estimated value loss by 2050 of 21% for equity versus 2.3% for debt under the expected climate scenario.
- Valuing private assets: How climate risk analysis can inform the valuation of unlisted assets and complement the Total Portfolio Approach.
Speaker: Rémy Estran-Fraioli, PhD, Chief Executive Officer, Scientific Climate Ratings
12.00 - 12.45 | Applying the Total Portfolio Approach when portfolios include unlisted assets
- Factors vs Asset Classes: TPA governs risk exposures rather than asset classes, but appraisal-based valuations mean the economic betas of private assets cannot be observed directly.
- Exposure Uncertainty: These exposures must instead be estimated with models, and the uncertainty in those estimates propagates through every part of the framework.
- Valuations, Risk, and Governance: The estimates shape the risk budget, leverage headroom, risk-adjusted performance and the relative attractiveness of opportunities, which makes them a central governance question for Boards and investment offices.
Speaker: Evan Clark, Senior Private Market Analyst, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute
12.45 – 13.45 - | Lunch
13.45 – 14.30 | Private debt: what can reported asset valuations tell us?
- Fair-value marks weaken before a loan is placed on non-accrual. Across 3,018 first transitions, the average mark falls from 0.951 eight quarters beforehand to 0.796 in the previous quarter, then drops further to 0.636 when the loan is classified.
- Lower marks help signal future distress. Among loans still accruing, those marked below 0.80 are placed on non-accrual within four quarters about 20 times as often as loans marked at or above cost.
- Some co-lenders classify comparable loans differently. In these cases, their reported marks are very similar, so the mark alone does not explain why one lender places a loan on non-accrual while another continues to accrue interest.
Speaker: Nastaran Bayat Patapeh, Risk Analyst, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute
14.30 – 15.15 | Private equity: how is value actually created?
- Cutting costs or growing: Evidence on a large sample of almost 5,000 European portfolio companies sheds light on how value has been created in buyouts – revenue and employment grow approximately 10% a year, with margins essentially flat
- Empirical measurement: How portfolio companies are measured greatly affects findings of how they perform operationally
- Primary versus secondary: Evidence on how buyout sequencing affects the value creation model
Speaker: Johan Ljungkvist, PhD, Senior Research Engineer, EDHEC Infrastructure and Private Assets Research Institute
15.15- 15.45 | Afternoon Break
15.45 – 16.30 | How to measure outperformance in private markets
- Why IRR, peer group quartiles and public market PMEs cannot separate manager skill from market returns in private markets.
- How Direct Alpha, applied against representative asset-level private market indices, splits fund performance into market return, allocation alpha and pure alpha.
- What evidence from more than 3,000 buyout and 500 infrastructure funds shows about the distribution of alpha and whether GP outperformance persists across successive funds.
Speaker: Abhishek Gupta, Head of Business and Product, Scientific Infrastructure and Private Assets, Part of PEI.
Featured Speakers
