The Swiss asset manager which pioneered private capital’s push to tap individuals is getting creative again — this time spurred by a wave of clients who want their money back.

For months, Partners Group Holding AG’s top executives have been trying to come up with a fix for the elevated redemption requests coming in as the performance of its older portfolios trailed those of some peers. Last week, Partners presented its solution for one of its flagship private equity funds, the €6.6 billion ($7.4 billion) Global Value SICAV. The untested approach could become a template — if it works.

Partners is creating two sub-portfolios, moving older assets into one pocket and a smaller number of newer investments which are more likely to generate higher returns into another. The move is aimed at giving investors who are keen on cashing out a way to do so, while letting those committed for the long-term stay invested in the fund’s more promising bets.

Executives are coming up with inventive responses at a time of elevated pressure on the Zug, Switzerland-based firm. The wave of redemption requests on its evergreen funds — which allow withdrawals at regular intervals — came this year alongside an attack by a short-seller alleging widespread overvaluation of its investments. A mini management re-shuffle last month has done little to arrest the roughly 38% slide in its share price since the start of the year.

While shareholders have yet to approve the portfolio split, Partners is considering adopting the approach for its other large evergreen funds such as its $14.4 billion US Master Fund, a person familiar with the matter said, asking not to be identified discussing internal information.

The Global Value fund first imposed its redemption limit of 5% net asset value per quarter in June, after withdrawal requests had surged to an estimated 9.8% in the second quarter. Requests for the third quarter have hit the 5% level again, according to a notification to wealth advisers.

Splitting the fund can make sense “to the extent that it is offering different investors different liquidity and return pathways,” said Mara Dobrescu, a senior principal at Morningstar. However, “the success of the approach will ultimately depend on how assets are really segregated between the two pockets, and whether future exits validate the underlying valuations,” she said.

A spokesperson for Partners Group said that the firm is confident that the strategy will become a blueprint for the industry.

“This evolution is not about liquidity considerations but rather about how the largest evergreen funds can continue to invest consistently in the growing opportunity set across private markets once they have outgrown their regular flow dynamics,” Partners Group said in the statement.

Dobrescu added that Partners Group is not facing a unique problem — delayed exits from private equity investments are affecting much of the industry. Partners Group may be particularly affected by that due to its long-standing strategy of marketing access to such investments to wealthy individuals — a class of investor potentially more likely to look to cash in when confidence dips.

The firm announced on Monday that it’s planning to wind down a separate €469 million London-listed trust after a majority of investors said they would like to exit.

That step was about finding a fix for the widespread discounts that listed private equity funds are currently suffering from, and some investors have signaled they’ll invest with the firm elsewhere, Partners Group said on Monday.

Still, Partners’ larger evergreen vehicles and its investment trust share the same problem: many of their investments date from the troubled Covid-era vintages, and are therefore less likely to deliver better returns than younger funds from bigger US rivals such as Blackstone Inc. and Ares Management Corp.

The issue for older evergreens is being exacerbated by the fact that the sector was growing strongly in 2021 and 2022, when private equity’s historic returns looked better.

Strong net inflows can pressure evergreen managers to deploy money faster, sometimes when deal activity and valuations are already elevated. Net redemptions, meanwhile, can prompt managers to preserve liquidity, potentially limiting their ability to invest when prices are more attractive.

Partners has been considering paring back the overall sizes of its evergreen funds, Chairman Steffen Meister told Bloomberg News in June.

But Partners Group’s move to offer investors in several vehicles a more dedicated route to liquidity has prompted some observers to question whether prospective buyers of its portfolio companies might seek to drive a harder bargain.

“The far larger Global Value SICAV fund creating a ‘distributing fund’ may impact” the exits of Partners’ investment trust “due to perceptions of investors seeking liquidity from Partners Group managed vehicles,” Peel Hunt analyst Markuz Jaffe wrote in a note to clients on Tuesday.

Five of Global Value’s 10 biggest portfolio companies are also among the 10 largest holdings of the London-listed trust, including air conditioning and electrical parts manufacturer DiversiTech and real estate services provider Emeria.

To be sure, some of Partners’ more recent private equity investments have recorded stronger earnings growth than the firm has seen in its 30-year history. And in infrastructure, the firm’s newer evergreens have outperformed many large rivals, according to a recent Goldman Sachs research report.

Partners said last week the proposed fund split won’t impede its plan to triple assets under management to $450 billion by 2033.

Part of this will depend on whether the asset manager’s various distribution partners — which include the likes of UBS, Deutsche Bank AG and Austria’s Erste Group Bank AG — continue to see demand for the products among their wealthy clients.

For now, hitting the target “is clearly going to be a stretch” as a “couple of years of low or no growth in assets under management in 2026 and 2027 due to the higher evergreen redemptions will create problems,” Barclays analyst Michael Sanderson said.

“These Partners-specific challenges are on top of the current broader challenging conditions facing the industry around value creation, realizations and fundraising.”