Major PCA Franchises: Evercore, Lazard, Jefferies, PJT

Introduction

Private capital advisory franchises have mostly been assembled rather than grown. The asset that matters is a web of relationships with limited partners, secondary buyers, and fund managers, and those relationships travel with the bankers who hold them, so firms have entered the business by buying a placement agent, inheriting a team through a corporate reorganization, or hiring a group of bankers from a rival. The five secondaries bankers Jefferies hired from Greenhill in 2020 had arrived at Greenhill five years earlier with its purchase of Cogent Partners, and the placement group Evercore runs today came from Neuberger Berman in 2010.

That history explains most of the differences a candidate notices between firms: which business lines a team runs, whether it leans toward LP portfolio sales or GP-led deals, how much of its reach sits in Europe or Asia, and whether a lending balance sheet stands behind it. Those differences matter more to a candidate than any ranking, because they decide what an analyst on the team actually works on.

Almost every franchise in the business traces back to one of three starting points, and the starting point still shapes what a team does best.

The placement agent is the oldest of these roles and the root of the first group.

Placement Agent

A firm or bank team hired by a fund manager to raise capital for a new fund. It positions the fund, identifies and introduces limited partners, prepares marketing materials, and manages the sequence of closes, and it is usually paid a fee tied to the capital raised. Many placement agents now also advise on secondaries.

Each origin comes with a different starting asset. A placement house owns an investor distribution network, the pensions, sovereign funds, and insurers it calls on every fund cycle, and the same network is what a manager needs when it syndicates a continuation vehicle or runs a tender offer. A secondaries boutique owns pricing history: years of bids on fund interests across hundreds of managers. The primary side of that split, and why established managers still hire agents, is covered in what placement agents do and when GPs hire them.

Cogent is the clearest secondaries-born case. When Greenhill agreed to buy it, Greenhill's February 2015 announcement described a Dallas firm founded in 2002 that advised pension funds, endowments, and other institutions on the secondary market, with offices in Dallas, London, New York, San Francisco, and Singapore. It brought 38 employees, eight of them managing directors, for total consideration of up to $97.6 million. A bank build owns neither network nor pricing history at the outset, which is why most of the bank builds above began by importing a team.

Five franchises come up most often in recruiting, and no two were built the same way. Evercore bought a placement business and hired a secondaries team beside it, Jefferies imported a team, and Lazard is adding an independent specialist to its in-house group.

Evercore: Separate Secondaries and Placement Teams

Evercore built its two private capital businesses at different times from different sources. The placement side, the Evercore Private Funds Group, arrived in February 2010 when Evercore bought Neuberger Berman's private funds placement group, an eight-person team headquartered in London with staff in Europe and the United States. The secondaries side followed three years later. In July 2013 Evercore announced a new private capital advisory business focused on secondary transactions in private fund interests, led globally by Nigel Dawn, previously global co-head of UBS's private funds group, with Nicolas Lanel, UBS's former co-head of secondary advisory, running Europe. The business was set up as majority-owned by Evercore, with its principals holding the minority stake.

Evercore now describes its PCA team as a secondaries advisor to sponsors and LPs that also uses structured, asset-backed solutions to raise capital and liquidity, and its PFG as an advisor on primary capital raising for selected fund sponsors. It publishes an annual secondary market report and, like Lazard, PJT, and Moelis, operates as an independent advisory firm without a corporate lending book.

Lazard and Campbell Lutyens: Assembling Lazard CL

Lazard's Private Capital Advisory group covers fundraising, secondaries, and private placements across private equity, private debt, real assets, and real estate, and has been led globally by Holcombe Green. On April 30, 2026 Lazard agreed to acquire Campbell Lutyens, and the deal's price and deferred structure are set out in the overview of what PCA bankers do. The combination joins a bank's in-house team with a placement-born independent.

Campbell Lutyens was founded in London in 1988 by John Campbell, Richard Lutyens, and Bill Dacombe and works in three lines: fund placement, secondary advisory, and GP capital advisory, across private equity, private credit, and infrastructure. At the announcement it operated from 15 locations on three continents. The combined unit, Lazard CL, is to be run by Green and Campbell Lutyens CEO Gordon Bajnai as co-CEOs, with more than 280 advisory professionals in 18 offices and a dedicated institutional distribution team of over 60 people.

Jefferies: A Secondaries Practice Built on a Team Hire

Jefferies entered secondaries advisory by hiring an established team. In October 2020 it hired five Greenhill managing directors who had come to Greenhill with the Cogent acquisition, including Scott Beckelman and Todd Miller, based in New York, Dallas, London, and San Francisco. Matt Wesley, who had earlier held senior roles at PJT Partners and Coller Capital, led the group as global head of private capital advisory and, by Moelis's account when it hired Wesley in February 2025, built Jefferies' secondary advisory, primary fundraising, and GP stakes businesses.

The practice also publishes the semiannual Global Secondary Market Review, built from Jefferies' own transactions, surveys and discussions with market participants, and public deal data. The July 2026 edition credits a Secondary Advisory team of more than 100 professionals, and it describes Jefferies as a full-service investment bank with sales, trading, and capital markets alongside advisory.

The other two large franchises reached the top tier from the primary fundraising side: one inherited a fund placement business in a spin-off, the other bought one and built secondaries, directs, and GP advisory around it.

PJT Park Hill: Placement Heritage From the Blackstone Spin-Off

Park Hill was established in 2005 as Blackstone's fund placement business. When Blackstone spun off its advisory businesses on October 1, 2015 and combined them with Paul Taubman's PJT Capital, Park Hill became one of PJT Partners' three business lines alongside strategic advisory and restructuring, as PJT's first annual report sets out. That filing described fund placement and secondary advisory for private equity, real estate, and hedge fund managers, and called Park Hill the only group among its peers with dedicated private equity, hedge fund, real estate, and secondary advisory teams.

The asset-class spread is still the distinctive feature. PJT's current description of PJT Park Hill adds alternative credit and direct and co-investment placements to the original lines, with secondaries advice for both GPs and LPs. On the GP-led side, PJT was lead financial advisor on CapVest's second continuation vehicle for Curium, announced in November 2025, the deal used in the comparison of PCA, sponsors coverage, and M&A.

Houlihan Lokey: An Integrated Private Funds Group

Houlihan Lokey assembled its Private Funds Group from hires and one acquisition. Triago, the placement pioneer it agreed to buy in December 2023, brought a 50-person staff in New York, San Diego, London, Paris, and Dubai, more than 200 completed fundraisings, and advice on the transfer of more than 3,500 private equity fund stakes; Triago's CEO Matt Swain became head of a new direct placements and secondaries practice inside the group.

The build continued after closing. In April 2024 Houlihan Lokey hired four Greenhill managing directors to run its US primary fundraising practice and described the combined group as more than 70 professionals offering primary, secondary, direct, and GP advisory from London, New York, Paris, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Frankfurt, and Dubai.

Beyond the large franchises sit firms that bought or hired their way in, usually with a sharper focus on one product, one client size, or one region: universal banks with lending books, mid-market platforms, and advisory firms concentrating on GP-led work.

Universal Banks: UBS and Mizuho

UBS has run a Private Funds Group since 1998, covering primary placement across private equity, private debt, infrastructure, and real estate, secondary advisory on LP interests and GP-led continuation funds, and GP capital advisory. It is also where several of today's secondaries leaders learned the business, including Dawn, who founded its secondary advisory team, and Lanel, who led that team's expansion into Europe.

Mizuho built its platform through two acquisitions. It bought Capstone Partners, a Dallas-based middle-market placement agent with a network of more than 1,500 LPs, in 2022, and completed its purchase of Greenhill on December 1, 2023. Mizuho now offers private capital advisory, primary fundraising, and secondary liquidity solutions to private equity, credit, real asset, and infrastructure managers. Both banks can pair advisory work with lending, the same distinction that runs through the comparison of bulge brackets, boutiques, and middle-market banks.

Mid-Market Platforms: William Blair, Raymond James, and Baird

William Blair launched its Private Capital Advisory practice in May 2022 under Mike Custar, offering fund placement, direct equity raising for co-investments, and secondary solutions, and set it up to work alongside its financial sponsor coverage bankers. Raymond James entered in 2021 by acquiring Cebile Capital, a placement agent and secondaries adviser to middle-market private equity firms founded by Sunaina Sinha Haldea, which became a unit of its investment bank.

Baird takes a narrower route through its Global GP Solutions Group, which advises sponsors on GP-initiated transactions: single-asset and multi-asset continuation funds, strip sales, tender offers, fund-level preferred equity, NAV loans, and firm-level financing for GPs.

Advisory Firms Building GP-Led Practices: Rothschild and Moelis

Rothschild & Co set up a GP Solutions team in 2021 to advise on GP-led deals, particularly continuation vehicles, and reported raising more than €3.5 billion across 13 transactions in 2023 and 2024. In March 2025 it hired Lanel, who had built European secondaries teams at UBS and Evercore, to develop the business across Europe. Moelis founded its Private Funds Advisory business in June 2014 with four managing directors hired from Greenhill, then expanded its secondaries effort in 2025 around Wesley and two former co-heads of Manulife's GP-led secondaries unit, Jeff Hammer and Paul Sanabria. Both firms concentrate on the product where the advisor's work is valuation, bid solicitation, and syndication, the work described in the advisor's role in a GP-led.

Firm profiles are easier to hold in memory as positions on a few dimensions:

Applied to the firms above, the first three dimensions sort as follows; client focus and geography sit in each profile.

Read down the origin column and very few franchises turn out to be pure organic builds. Read down the platform column and independent advisers account for four of the five large franchises, the same structure that shapes the major restructuring franchises, where PJT, Houlihan Lokey, Evercore, Lazard, and Moelis also appear, though there the counterparties are creditors rather than LPs and secondary buyers.

Why Team Moves Reshape the Map

The origin column also hides a second pattern: franchises move with people. A PCA team's value sits largely in its senior bankers' relationship capital with LPs, GPs, and buyers, and the quickest way for a bank to acquire those relationships is to hire the bankers who hold them.

Team Lift-Out

The simultaneous hiring of an entire group of bankers, usually several senior bankers and their juniors, from one firm by another. The hiring firm gains a working practice and its client relationships without buying the company. Lift-outs are common in specialist advisory businesses where relationships sit with individuals rather than the institution.

Greenhill is the clearest illustration of how lift-outs redraw the map, because its private capital bankers seeded three rival franchises within a decade. They left in three separate waves, each to a different competitor, and each wave became the core of a new or expanded group rather than a handful of additions to an existing one.

Individual careers trace the same web. Wesley moved from PJT to lead Jefferies' group and then to Moelis; Dawn founded secondary advisory at UBS and then built Evercore's; Lanel helped build UBS's and Evercore's European teams before joining Rothschild. The practical consequence is that team facts date quickly: a franchise strong in GP-led deals one year may have lost the bankers who made it so by the next, so every description of a team needs a date.

PCA interviewers often probe whether a candidate knows how the franchise was built and whom it competes with, because both shape the work an analyst would do. The research that answers those questions is mostly public:

Two questions sharpen the preparation. First, which of the lines in the comparison table does the team you are meeting actually run, and does a separate team at the same firm run the others? Second, what changed most recently: an acquisition, a new head, a lift-out in or out? A candidate who knows that Houlihan Lokey's US primary practice is led by bankers hired from Greenhill in 2024, or that Lazard CL is still awaiting closing, shows preparation that no generic answer can. The broader approach to answering why this bank specifically applies, and the guide's recruiting article covers how these teams hire.

Rankings need more care than any other fact. The advisory volumes firms publish about themselves, such as the transaction volume Jefferies reports its own team advised on, are self-reported and measured on each firm's own definitions, so the caution in how league tables are built applies with extra force.

The published market reviews deserve a closer read than the press releases, because they show what each franchise counts and how it frames the market for clients. Evercore and Jefferies both reported record 2025 volume but with different totals, and Campbell Lutyens put the year above $200 billion in its own overview; the reasons the totals differ are explained in where the secondaries market stands. Reading the interviewing firm's own report, and knowing where its figures sit against a competitor's, is the most direct evidence a candidate can give of having studied that particular franchise.