Federated Hermes GPE

Peter Gale serves as Chief Executive Officer of Private Equity and Head of Private Markets at Federated Hermes, overseeing the firm's private equity fund-of-funds, co-investment, and secondaries programs. He joined the firm as part of the legacy Hermes GPE team, which had managed private equity commitments for the BT Pension Scheme since 1995. His investment committee governs all fund commitments and direct co-investment decisions.

Federated Hermes GPE is the private equity division of Federated Hermes, a publicly traded global asset manager formed through the 2018 merger of Pittsburgh-based Federated Investors and London-based Hermes Investment Management. The private equity team operates from London and functions as a specialist alternatives unit within the firm's broader investment platform, which manages assets across fixed-income, equities, and private markets for institutional and intermediary clients.

The group pursues a hybrid model. It allocates to primary private equity buyout and growth fund commitments alongside established GPs, executes direct co-investments alongside those sponsors, and maintains an active secondaries program. Infrastructure equity and private credit strategies are managed through adjacent teams but sit within the same private markets platform.

The unit descends from Hermes Investment Management, which was originally the in-house investment manager for the BT Pension Scheme — one of the UK's largest corporate pension plans. This heritage embedded a liability-aware, long-horizon investment philosophy and a stewardship emphasis that persists even after the firm became part of a listed manager. Client capital today comes from third-party pension funds, insurers, and sovereign wealth institutions.

Co-investments are a central pillar of the strategy. The group writes equity checks alongside GPs it has underwritten for fund commitments, targeting mid-market buyout and growth deals in healthcare, business services, and software. A dedicated co-investment pool closed to commitments in September 2023, confirming the firm's intent to scale this direct exposure further.

Through its fund and direct programs, the group gains exposure to healthcare, enterprise software, financial services, and business services companies, primarily in North America and Western Europe. The manager selection process favors mid-market buyout and growth equity funds, with infrastructure and private credit investments managed through parallel specialist teams.

No. Federated Hermes reports total assets under management across all asset classes but does not publicly break out the private equity fund-of-funds, co-investment, or secondaries pools as standalone figures. The private markets platform across all sub-strategies is material but sits within a much larger public-markets complex.