With the opening of its Milan office, Ares aims to strengthen its Italian and European business with a particular focus on Wealth Management. The structure led in Italy by Alessandro Verdirrame (head of Ares Wealth Management Solutions Italy), a highly experienced and reliable manager, reflects Ares’ desire to build a bridge between institutional capital and high-profile private investors. The team managed by Verdirrame is tasked with expanding the business of asset management and alternative investment solutions.
Can you tell us about Ares and how it supports the wealth management industry in accessing private markets?
Ares Management is one of the world’s leading alternative investment managers, with over $595 billion in assets under management (as of September 30, 2025). The company offers a wide range of primary and secondary investment solutions across the major asset classes: private credit, private equity, real estate, and infrastructure.
Through its Wealth Management Solutions (AWMS) division, Ares makes the expertise and resources of its institutional platform available to the wealth management channel, offering investment solutions designed to meet the needs of individual investors.
Today, WMS enables qualified individual investors in EMEA, APAC, and North America to participate in private credit, private equity, real estate, infrastructure, and opportunities in emerging sectors such as sports, media, and entertainment. With a growing team of over 165 professionals in more than 10 offices across the United States, Europe, and Asia, this platform is one of the largest and most structured for the distribution of investment solutions in private markets and the range of services dedicated to the wealth management industry.
What is Italy’s role in Ares’ European strategy?
Italy is a strategic market for Ares, including in the wealth management channel. The recent opening of our Milan office demonstrates our commitment to strengthening our presence in the Italian market and allows us to be even closer to our partners and investors. This local presence allows us not only to raise and deploy capital more effectively, but also to support the asset management industry more directly.
To respond to the evolving needs of Italian clients and actively collaborate with our partners and investors, we have created a local team dedicated to distributing our investment solutions to the wealth management sector. In recent years, Italian operators have shown greater openness to private capital as an alternative to traditional financing, and this is also reflected in the portfolios of individual investors.
Why are private markets becoming increasingly relevant to wealth management?
As with our institutional clients, we have found that individual investors are strongly inclined to increase their exposure to alternative investment strategies. The demand for alternative investments from private investors is significant, growing steadily, and reflects the desire to access an investment category that until a few years ago was reserved exclusively for institutional investors. Although the goal may be shared, private investors have historically had less access to alternative investments to diversify and optimize their portfolios.
Today, the volatility and uncertainty of public markets are driving many investors toward private markets, attracted by the opportunity to achieve stable, uncorrelated returns. The greatest interest we are seeing is in income-oriented asset classes, such as private credit and infrastructure, and we believe this trend is part of a long-term structural shift in allocations toward private markets.
What distinguishes Ares’ approach to private markets from other managers?
Ares opened up access to private markets for the retail channel over 20 years ago with the launch of our U.S. Direct Lending strategy. This path has allowed us to develop a distinctive advantage based on our experience, established track record, and the scale of our platform.
In 2021, we created our Wealth Management Solution division, dedicated to the asset management industry, to respond to growing demand from individual investors and in line with our commitment to democratizing private market investments.
Today, we support the wealth management sector through tailor-made investment solutions, training programs, and private market analysis, as well as advice on asset allocation and portfolio strategies. In Europe, our current offering of evergreen strategies allows qualified individual investors to access our European Direct Lending strategy, launched in 2007, benefiting from its scale, local origination network, portfolio management capabilities, and experience in deploying capital, with the aim of generating attractive risk-adjusted returns. With the growing expansion and penetration of private credit in Europe, we believe we are well positioned to build on our track record and continue to invest in a disciplined manner in attractive investments, supporting the growth plans and long-term needs of the companies we finance.
How is Ares innovating to make private markets more accessible?
Our goal is to build portfolios with return profiles designed to meet the diverse needs of individual investors, working with our distribution partners to understand priorities and define the most appropriate solutions. We want to make the experience and resources of our institutional platform available to the wealth management channel, offering evergreen investment solutions that provide flexibility and access to private markets. In some cases, the emphasis is on capital growth, as is the case with secondary and private equity strategies; in others, it is more income-oriented, as in private credit and real assets. Our team of wealth strategists provides analytical tools and training programs to help advisors and investors understand the role of private markets in the overall portfolio. In addition, we use data to identify trends in advisor behavior in order to better support the evolving needs of different generations of investors.
What trends will dominate the next five years and how is Ares preparing to lead them?
Over the next five years, we expect to see an acceleration of the structural trend toward greater allocation to private markets, driven in part by growing interest among individual investors in solutions that generate stable income streams that are resilient to market cycles. Many investors are still in the early stages of their private market investment journey, but are already benefiting from lower volatility than listed markets and a steady distribution of income, especially in certain asset classes, a dynamic that we believe will further consolidate in the coming years.
To fully capitalize on this opportunity and achieve our goals, we are strengthening our wealth management division by bringing in highly qualified professionals who can offer expertise ranging from local relationships with distributors and key stakeholders to in-depth knowledge of products and regulations. At the same time, we continue to invest in product innovation and the expansion of our global distribution network, which also includes Italy.
Article taken from the December issue of Family Office & Family Business. Subscribe here to read the magazine in print or digital format.
