Barings names DWS veteran to lead U.S. wealth expansion

Barings said Monday, according to InvestmentNews, that it has created a new seat at the top of its U.S. wealth distribution effort and named Brian Maute, a two-decade veteran of the intermediary channel, to the newly created role of Head of U.S. Wealth, leading the $502 billion alternative asset manager's push across RIAs, broker-dealers, private banks, family offices and other wealth platforms and reporting to Ilena Coyle, Barings' Head of North America Insurance and Intermediary Distribution.

Maute's mandate covers Barings' global investment platform — credit, real assets, capital solutions and emerging markets — but the core of the job is building educational resources for wealth managers folding alternatives into client portfolios, a recognition that alternatives distribution in the U.S. has rarely been held back by a shortage of product so much as a shortage of advisors confident enough to put illiquid strategies in front of clients. Maute spent more than 15 years at DWS Group, where he built the firm's U.S. Wealth Alternative Investments Division before rising to head of U.S. Wealth and CEO of DWS Distributors, and earlier held senior roles at Invesco and Van Kampen Investments at Morgan Stanley Investment Management — a career spent building the educational infrastructure alternatives distribution now demands.

Cerulli Associates' research shows the industry is still figuring out how to staff that infrastructure: just over half of asset managers offering alternatives rely on a generalist wholesaler backed by dedicated alternatives specialists, roughly a quarter use generalists alone, and Cerulli analysts read the split as evidence that no established best practice has emerged for pairing generalist and specialist coverage. Three-quarters of asset managers name advisor education as their single biggest obstacle to alternatives distribution among high-net-worth-focused firms.

Advisors overseeing at least $500 million currently put 4.4% of client portfolios into illiquid alternatives, and Cerulli projects that figure will reach 5.7% by 2027, a 130-basis-point increase that represents a meaningful shift in how much of the wealth channel's shelf is devoted to private-market strategies. Barings is positioning itself to capture that shift with a dedicated executive, rather than leaving intermediaries to discover its credit and real assets businesses on their own.

Barings, a MassMutual subsidiary partly owned by MS&AD after MassMutual agreed to sell an 18% stake through Mitsui Sumitomo Insurance, is making a deliberate bet on a particular structure: a senior distribution leader with a mandate that explicitly includes education. The hire is also the latest evidence that wealth's talent war has moved to the C-suite. As this publication has argued, the private-markets on-ramp has moved beyond access to liquidity and tax complexity; advisors' education gap is the next choke point, and Cerulli's numbers make the stakes concrete. The manager that solves that problem — with dedicated specialists, a curriculum that actually trains wholesalers, and the patience to build rather than buy distribution — is the one whose products end up in the 5.7%.

Maute's new title gives him the authority to build that machine. The number to watch is 5.7%, and the deadline is 2027.