SEI to build Carlyle private equity CITs for Basic Capital plans

SEI is building collective investment trusts that carry Carlyle private equity into Basic Capital retirement plans. The first trust will blend public equity with Carlyle's private equity inside a participant's existing large-cap equity allocation.

Basic Capital's retirement plans are the distribution channel, and this is the first announced CIT from the partnership. The coverage does not state what the trust will charge, what share of the equity sleeve Carlyle's holdings will take, or when the vehicle launches.

Plan advisers and consultants assemble lineups from discrete sleeves, so a trust that bundles private equity into the large-cap slot changes what a single menu line contains. Someone reading a large-cap equity position in a Basic Capital plan would hold a slice of Carlyle's portfolio, putting valuation frequency and liquidity terms on the due-diligence agenda.

For the 200 public pension funds AIC studied, private equity's median 10-year annualized return was 13.2%, against 10.58% for public equities. The asset class has topped public pension returns for 14 consecutive years, AIC found. Those are pension-fund results, a 2.6 percentage-point annual gap over a decade, and they say nothing by themselves about what a participant earns on a daily-priced CIT holding the same assets.