2026 private markets roadmap

What is your review of private markets for 2025?

When we look back at 2025, I think several lessons can be taken from the market status. The first one is a gradual recovery of the volumes of transactions across the board. The year started well, but then we had uncertainty in terms of microeconomics with the introduction of tariff in the US. But since summer, I think things have been looking up. We've seen more M&A coming through, and also a few IPOs taking place.

So I think in general, that's been stabilising over the year. The liquidity situation remains pretty tight. I think investors are not getting as many distribution as they used to be. I think the secondary market, which is growing very, very fast, I think we're going to reach more than $200 billion of transaction value for 2025 is only fulfilling some of the void here in terms of liquidity. So I think that's something to watch in the future.

And finally, valuations have been stabilising coming back down to historical levels, or pre-COVID levels, around 9 to 10x EV/EBITDA for the small mid cap market in Europe. And I think that's something we see continuing because sellers need to accept a slightly new reality when it comes to pricing. Even though if you look at sectors, more resilient and growing sectors like tech and healthcare, are still trading at very high multiples in general.

What is your outlook for private markets 2026?

So if you look at 2026, I think the year started pretty well. I think in terms of transaction volume, we should see a steady recovery in normalisation to very decent levels across the board. Not only in the small midcap level, but also in the large cap. I think there's also a backlog of companies to be sold, which are 4, 5, 6 years old into the funds. So this has to come to the market.

Secondly, I think investors are going to remain very, very selective and they're going to probably prune their portfolio by stopping investing with some managers who might struggle to raise money. I think some sense of Darwinism might be taking place in the market. And our job is really to pick the right managers and stay aligned when it comes to investing with them.

And finally, I think the AI, the artificial intelligence is coming to the asset class. I think we see that at the level of the managers, who are using that to manage their investments but also help their portfolio companies. But we will also at Flexstone start to integrate AI when it comes to sourcing and data management and helping us and supporting us in due diligence.

What is going to drive private equity growth?

The perspective for private equity in 2026 following a good year of recovery in 2025 are favourable. What we also note in as far investors are concerned is an increase in the investment by private individuals in the asset class, which used to be restricted to institutional investors. There are some trends. There are also some regulatory new rules that allow the growth of retailisation of private assets. The global view is that for individual investors to access a highly profitable asset class, which is going to support the growth of small and mid-cap companies in real life, in the real economy, which is a long-term investment with the diversification of the assets of such individuals and private investors.