Spear’s Review

A US native who moved to London in 1999, Rashmi Madan is senior managing director and head of EMEA at Blackstone’s private wealth solutions division.

Madan tells Spear’s she is on a mission to ‘educate’ private bankers on the art of private equity; we learn over coffee that illiquidity isn’t such a bad thing.

She observes that UK bankers trade private funds on an exchange, ‘because they need daily liquidity’. But doing this can be damaging to portfolios, particularly those which are focused on growth. ‘As soon as you start trading private markets on an exchange, it acts like a public market,’ she says.

Madan joined Blackstone in 2011 after serving as an executive director at J.P. Morgan for more than eight years. She started off as a senior managing director and the COO of Blackstone’s institutional arm, focusing on Europe. During this tenure, she promoted five women to managing director roles within the company. ‘That was huge,’ she recalls.