Private Markets Global Conference

Professor Zeisberger is an advisor to corporations, institutional investors and governments. She has over 30 years of experience as a finance professional and is an expert with deep experience in risk management, private equity and venture capital, and portfolio construction. As a Professor at INSEAD, the business school with campuses in Singapore, France, UAE and the US, she is a global citizen and award-winning author as well as an angel investor.
 

At present, she is a member of KKR’s Sustainable Expert Advisory Committee (SEAC) and sits on the Advisory Boards of Standard Chartered Ventures, Linzor Capital, BG Ventures and KaizenVest and acts as a volunteer board advisor to Girl Rising, a non-profit focused on girls' education and empowerment.
 

Claudia is one of the best-networked people in the Private Capital space with extensive experience in bringing her academic and professional background to inform boards. She is an expert on Responsible Investing and ESG strategy implementation and is often invited in the role of ‘Professional Devil’s Advocate’. She is also the author of “Mastering Private Equity: Transformation via Venture Capital, Minority Investments and Buyouts” and “Private Equity in Action”.

Milton Berlinski of Reverence Capital to be the interviewee for the CEO discussion. Reverence has both a private equity arm specializing in financial services as well as a private debt business. The firm also qualifies as a minority owned business so we can tick that box.

Bjarne serves as Verdane’s Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer. In 2003, he launched what later became Verdane, by leading a spin-out from Verdane’s predecessor firm Four Seasons Venture.
 

At Verdane, he has been instrumental in building companies such as Banqsoft, Chipcon, Kappa Bioscience, Resman, and Wireless Maingate. He currently serves on the board of Polytech.
 

Bjarne had joined Four Seasons Venture’s Oslo office in 2001 from PaperX, a venture-backed B2B marketplace of which he was co-founder and COO. Bjarne also has entrepreneurial experience from the oil & gas sector with Fountain Oil. He was formerly a consultant at McKinsey & Company in London and a research associate at the European University Institute in Florence.
 

In addition to his role at the helm of Verdane, Bjarne is a Board member of the Norwegian Venture Capital Association.

Education: Bjarne holds an MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School (USA) and an MA in European Integration from the University of Oslo (Norway)/European University Institute Florence (Italy).

Randy Schwimmer is Senior Managing Director and Co-Head of Senior Lending at Churchill Asset Management LLC. Churchill is a credit asset management firm that provides senior debt to middle market companies. It is affiliated with Nuveen, the asset management division of TIAA and one of the largest global asset managers across multiple asset classes.
 

Mr. Schwimmer is also founder/publisher of The Lead Left, Churchill’s weekly newsletter. The Lead Left reviews deals and trends in the capital markets with a unique focus on the mid-market space and is read by thousands of influential industry participants.
 

Mr. Schwimmer brings 30 years of experience in middle market finance to Churchill, and is widely credited with developing loan syndications for middle market companies. He was a founding partner and Head of Capital Markets at Churchill Financial LLC, a middle market finance company acquired by The Carlyle Group. At Carlyle, he was a Managing Director responsible for all middle market loan capital markets activities, including loan structuring, syndications and distribution within the Carlyle GMS team.
 

Before then, Mr. Schwimmer was Managing Director and Head of Leveraged Finance Syndication for BNP Paribas. He spent 15 years at JP Morgan Chase in Corporate Banking and Loan Syndications, where he originated, structured, and syndicated leveraged loans.
 

Mr. Schwimmer graduated cum laude from Trinity College with a B.A. He earned his M.A. from the University of Chicago.

Jonathan Lewinsohn is the Managing Partner of Diameter Capital Partners LP, a multi-billion dollar credit-focused investment manager he co-founded in 2017 with Scott Goodwin. Diameter seeks to combine research and trading to invest across the credit spectrum from new issue and performing credit to stressed and distressed.
 

Prior to co-founding Diameter, Mr. Lewinsohn was a Senior Managing Director (Partner) at Centerbridge Partners, LP and was previously Head of North American Research at Anchorage Capital Group, LLC where he was a permanent member of the firm’s Investment Committee across all its funds. Earlier in his career, Mr. Lewinsohn served as a law clerk to Judge Richard A. Posner of the U.S. Court of Appeals and worked in mergers & acquisitions at Morgan Stanley.
 

Mr Lewinsohn has extensive restructuring experience having invested in distressed companies in North America, Europe, and Australia and served on multiple boards of directors of public and private companies. He has been published in the Yale Law Journal, the Yale Journal of International Law, and in Antitrust Law Stories (2007 Foundation Press).
 

Mr. Lewinsohn received his J.D. from Yale Law School, where he was an editor of the Yale Law Journal, and his B.A., summa cum laude, from Cornell University’s College of Arts and Sciences, where he was Phi Beta Kappa and recognized as a Merrill Presidential Scholar for graduating in the top 1% of the class. He is a member of the Economic Club of New York and serves on the boards of the Yale Law School Fund, which advises the Dean on strategic issues; the Mount Sinai Hospital Children’s Center Foundation; and the Abraham Joshua Heschel School. He (still!) lives in New York City with his wife Elizabeth and children.

Ania is responsible for the evaluating and reviewing private equity managers and co-investments, with a focus on France and southern Europe. She is part of Mercer alternatives investments private markets group in Zurich.
 

She joined Mercer in 2020 from Lombard Odier, Geneva where she was responsible for the European private equity program and global real assets. She also launched the asset manager’s first impact private equity fund. Prior to this she worked at Morgan Stanley as a real estate private equity associate, where she was responsible for new acquisitions and asset management in central Europe and the Nordics.
 

Ania holds an MBA from Instituto de Empresa in Madrid, Spain, as well as an MA (Hons) in economics from the University of Cambridge.

Raelan is responsible for managing Mercer’s global alternatives business of approximately 190 investment professionals across 25 offices worldwide. She serves on multiple investment committees within Alternatives and is a member of Mercer Wealth’s Core Leadership team, its Global Strategy Advisory Group, Investment Governance Committee and Marsh McLennan’s Leadership team.

She joined Pavilion in 2016, which was bought by Mercer in 2018, as a managing director, where she was also a member of the investment committee. Prior to that she held roles at LP Capital Advisors, and before that she worked at DoubleClick, a Google marketing company, where she focused on developing new relationships with financial institutions. Before that she was a senior manager in the bank’s internal consulting team, which worked directly with the firm's C-level executives and all divisions of the firm and its top technology partners.

Raelan holds a bachelor’s degree in French Language and Literature from the University of Virginia.

Garvan specialises in alternatives, including hedge fund and private market investments, where he primarily focusses on the alternative allocations for discretionary client accounts.

He joined Mercer in 2003, where he worked on the investment consulting team advising institutional investors on investment strategy and manager selection.

Garvan holds a bachelor’s degree in Actuarial and Financial Studies from University College Dublin. He is a Fellow of both the Institute of Actuaries in the UK and the Society of Actuaries in Ireland, as well as a Chartered Alternative Investment Analyst Charterholder.

Deb joined Mercer in 2010 as an investment analyst, where she worked predominantly with institutional investors and assisted senior consultants of a variety topics, including investment strategy, manager selection, performance reporting and intellectual capital generation. She then progressed to Alternatives Portfolio Manager in 2014, where she focused on the portfolio construction, manager selection and ongoing monitoring of discretionary client alternatives portfolios, across both multi-investor pooled solutions and bespoke accounts.
 

She is a member of Mercer’s Global Investment Solutions Group and sits on Mercer’s Hedge Fund Research Ratings Committee.
 

Deborah holds a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics from the University of Nottingham. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst Charterholder, Chartered Alternatives Investment Analyst  Charterholder, and holds the Investment Management Certificate from the CFA Society of the UK.