Ten years of Ardian, a pioneer of responsible investment

From AXA Private Equity to Ardian, a pioneer of responsible finance

Ardian is a private investment house with a unique story and culture. The company started life in 1996 as AXA Private Equity when Claude Bébéar, then the Chairman of AXA, asked Dominique Senequier to create a private equity arm for the insurer.

Ardian was created in 2013 when Senequier led an employee buyout of AXA Private Equity, with around 80% of employees becoming shareholders in the new company at this date. Since then, the company has grown rapidly while achieving recognition for its trailblazing approach to sustainable finance and positive impact.

Dominique Senequier’s vision of value sharing

Delivering long-term value while sharing profits with employees has long been the hallmark of Senequier’s responsible investment approach. Back in 2008, against the backdrop of the global financial crisis, she argued that private equity needed to focus more on shared outcomes rather than short-term profit. To this end, she made a public pledge to share, wherever possible, a part of the capital gains on exit with the employees of companies Ardian bought, developed and sold.

Pioneering the practice of profit sharing, she led the industry through interventions in the press calling on all private equity firms to do the same. As of the end of 2022, Ardian’s visionary approach has benefited around 31,000 employees from 43 portfolio companies.

Since 2008, sustainability has become an increasingly important part of our DNA and an area in which we have set trends within our industry. Our company signed the UN’s Principles for Responsible Investment in 2009, becoming one of the first signatories from the private equity industry, while in 2022 Ardian became the first European company to join Ownership Works, a US non-profit organization that advocates all-employee share ownership schemes and helps to educate employees on investment. Our sustainability strategy is not limited to Ardian but also involves assisting the portfolio companies we support to implement best-practice ESG measures.

Ardian is a people business whose success depends on the collective intelligence of its employees. As a result, its policy of Inclusion & Diversity forms a core part of the company’s identity, actively seeking to recruit people from non-traditional backgrounds and empowering women in the industry through the Ardian Women’s Club. At Ardian, we are convinced that inclusive and diverse organizations are more creative, innovative and likely to outperform, and we strive to cultivate diversity both at Ardian and in our over 250 portfolio companies.

The company is extremely proud of how this focus on value sharing, inclusion and diversity, and creating long-term sustainable value for society has helped bring about a paradigm shift in the private equity industry, bringing responsible investment into the mainstream.

A unique offer to investors

Ardian is recognized as a trusted partner for its clients and strives to help them achieve their goals. The company operates from a global network of 16 offices, with over 1,000 employees, serving over 1,470 investors, including governments, pension funds, insurers, banks, endowment funds, family offices and high-net-worth individuals. We aim to provide a highly responsive, personal service to each investor which delivers investment solutions tailored to fit their needs.

As a measure of our achievement, in ten years we have increased our assets under management or advised from $36 billion to $150 billion.

Despite the remarkable growth we have experienced over the past decade, we maintain a strong entrepreneurial spirit, working closely on the ground with talented managers to create resilient, high-quality companies. Our network of local offices is designed so that we stay close to our investors and understand their priorities.

While investors value our strong European identity, we are a global player serving clients across the world. Our multilocal strategy began in 2001 with the opening of our Frankfurt office, which was followed rapidly by many others. The most recent office opening we celebrated was in Abu Dhabi, our first in the Middle East.

Data science, a key part of our growth strategy

Part of the way we are securing our future growth is by expanding the sophistication of our technology, investing in digitalization both to create value and to complement the dedicated service we offer our investors.

In recent years, we have been building bespoke data tools, for example Ardian Air Carbon, a groundbreaking platform to model carbon emissions from airports and support responsible infrastructure investments. In 2020, we notably launched our online investor portal, Trustview Ardian, which enables every investor to easily and securely access comprehensive information on all their holdings with us on a single dashboard. This innovation made us the first GP in the world to provide a digital platform where investors can see future cash flows for each of their investments.

The success of these projects led us, last year, to go even further by expanding our data science teams. We aim to create a company-wide data science team with at least one member sitting within each of our investment teams, which will offer them additional information on the performance of portfolio companies, including non-financial KPIs that private equity companies would not have monitored in the past.

The next chapter of our story

Ever since Ardian’s creation, a focus on the long term has been part of the company’s distinctive signature. It is this future-oriented perspective that informs our purpose:

With the positive impact we can have for society and the value we can create for all our stakeholders, at Ardian we are eagerly looking forward to the next ten years of our story.