AA Advisors

Alexandra Daly

Founder & CEO

Alexandra Daly founded AA Advisors in 2007 and has been raising capital in the alternatives industry for the last 19 years, helping raise billions of dollars for Hedge Funds, Private Equity, Real Estate and Venture Capital firms to date.

In addition to her work with AA Advisors, Alexandra leads an initiative spun out of the Alison Rose Review of Female Entrepreneurship, commissioned by the UK Government, which aims to promote entrepreneurialism across the UK and reduce the entrepreneurial gender gap.  Alexandra is the Chair of the Council for Investing in Female Entrepreneurs, a steering committee comprised of leading financial institutions, which is looking at implementing the recommendations of the Rose Review that urge LPs and investment funds to help their clients invest in female-run businesses. As part of her role she is helping to address the funding challenges for female-run businesses and entrepreneurs seeking to access capital from the alternatives community. Alexandra was awarded the Investment Consultant of the Year award at the 2020 Women in Finance Awards for her work in supporting female entrepreneurship.

Prior to founding AA Advisors, Alexandra worked for the Man Group for three years, where she cross-sold the firm’s multi-manager platforms, fund of funds businesses and investment services capabilities to European and UAE institutions, sovereign wealth funds, and family offices. Prior to this, Alexandra worked at J.P. Morgan in their London office in the derivatives products group. She started her career in finance at Morgan Stanley, as a member of the Fixed Income and Money Markets division. Alexandra has a BA Honours in Law from City University of London.  

Peter Arnold

Senior Consultant

Peter Arnold has spent 25+ years as a banking and asset management professional in senior leadership roles across Business Development, Sales, Marketing and Capital Raising. During his career he has worked across all major traditional and alternative asset classes, with a broad spectrum of institutional, intermediary and UHNWI clients. In his most recent role at Schroders Capital, Peter helped drive significant uplift in AUM as Global Head of Private Asset Sales. He broadened the firms coverage from the UK and DACH regions to create a sales function with genuine global capability. In addition, Peter was very focused on diversity at Schroders and was pivotal in creating a much better gender balance in the private asset sales team in Asia and Europe. Prior to Schroders, Peter was Head of International Fund Distribution at Citigroup where he set up a private placement facility for the bank concentrating on Private Debt, Infrastructure and RE specialist managers. Peter is deeply involved in strategic leadership and currently sits on management committees that have given him exposure to other product areas, asset classes and geographies. 

Raj Dhown

Senior Consultant

Raj Dhown has 30+ years of experience dealing with and advising financial institutions in both Europe and Asia in respect of a wide mandate that covers risk & capital management, various forms of financing and investments into alternative products. Raj recently left NatWest Markets Singapore where he ran Sales across APAC. During his tenure at NatWest, Raj focused on delivering UK alternative debt assets (CRE, infrastructure, consumer loans, etc) to institutional investors (including life insurance cos who have adopted new Solvency 2-type Risk Based Capital regimes) across Asia under “Originate-to-Distribute” co-investment partnership platforms. Prior to joining NatWest, Raj co-founded iCapital Advisory Limited, with offices in HK and Singapore, a private debt advisory firm that advised medium sized borrowers in Asia seeking private financing from the growing number of non-bank lenders in Asia. In addition, it was placement agent for alternative asset managers in Europe (eg Cheyne Capital) looking to raise AUM from Family Offices, Private Banks and institutional investors in Asia. Prior to this, he was a senior Managing Director at Citigroup where he was responsible for the Financial Institutions Solutions business in APAC (ex-Japan). His role at Citi involved extensive engagement with CFOs, CIOs and regulators of financial institutions regionally to identify key problems & issues and propose cross-asset class solutions including the delivery of derivative solutions and alternative investments. Raj was also responsible for the Citi International Funds Distribution business in APAC. Prior to his eight years at Citi, Raj held various senior client-facing roles at Lehman Bros, Deutsche Bank and JP Morgan in Europe. Raj is a qualified UK Chartered Accountant (having previously worked at Price Waterhouse Coopers) and holds a BA Hons in Economics from Manchester University.

Paula crockett

Head of Sales

Paula Crockett has 25+ years experience in the Credit and Structured Credit Markets, most recently at Vantage Capital where she jointly set up a desk to source and place assets between clients. Formerly she worked in the London office of UBS for over 20 years as part of the leading ABS/Structured Credit team covering UK and European clients.

Mike Scott

Senior Sales Consultant

Mike's 30 years experience of financial markets range from selling vanilla government and corporate debt to complex structured credit and alternative debt structures.

His career began at Citibank in the late 80’s and witnessed the growth in European ABS and structured credit with the advent of synthetic risk being applied to credit market investments. This continued throughout his career at ABN Amro, Credit Agricole, Mizuho and KNG Securities.

Sara Simmons

Senior Sales Consultant

Sara has worked in structured credit markets for over 25 years. Covering a range of products, from securitisations, receivables-backed transactions, LBOs, syndicated loans, high yield bonds, convertibles, asset swaps to trade finance. She has worked in London, New York and Hong Kong for Bankers Trust, JP Morgan, Mizuho.

Connor Miles

Senior Associate

Connor leads AA Advisors’ Investor Relations team and is in charge of circulating manager materials to investors, assisting with both investment and operational due diligence, as well as keeping dedicated records of investor engagements throughout the life of a raise.

He liaises with all members of the sales team, advising on LP distribution strategy, particularly at the initiation of a fundraise cycle. He is also responsible for expanding the firm’s network with international investors.

Alvaro Pernas

Consultant

Alvaro Pernas began his career at Banco Santander de Negocios in Madrid in 1987 where he ran the Fixed Income Sales desk. He moved to London in 1991 to join the Morgan Stanley Fixed Income Division where he set up and ran the Iberia & Greece Fixed Income sales team (Credit and rates) until 2006 when he left to set up Bretema Capital Advisors.

Alvaro joined Marine Capital, a shipping specialist FCA registered fund manager as a partner and Director in 2007 until his departure in 2021. He also held a position as Director in Eclipse Shipping until May 2023. He currently focuses on Transition Energy, Shipping and Real Estate advisory work at Bretema Capital. He holds a Law Degree and an Economics Degree from the Universidad Pontificia Comillas-ICADE.

LUCY LERNER

Investor Relations

Lucy is responsible for investor relations and runs project administration alongside interfacing with AA Advisors general partner clients.

Madilean Coen

Senior Consultant

Madilean Coen began her 20 year career at Prudential Securities working in the futures and commodities division. As a portfolio and CTA analyst, she used evaluation tools to select, analyse and optimise multi-manager funds for high-net-worth clients, institutions and to create Managed Futures funds as well as funds of hedge funds. As a part of the Managed Futures division, she was responsible for helping grow the Managed Futures and alternative fund of funds business, eventually directing the global sales team from New York. In 2000, she joined Scudder Investments in London as Regional Sales Director for Europe and the Middle East to expand the distribution of their long-only equity and fixed income funds. Following the merger between Scudder Investments and Deutsche Bank, she became the Head of European Retail Distribution for Deutsche Asset Management.  Since leaving Deustche Asset Management, she has held senior asset management positions including being the co-founder of Blacksquare Capital, a funds of hedge funds asset management firm which she later sold.  Madilean has also held senior institutional positions as Head of Distribution, Asset Management for Jefferies International specialising in the  distribution of UCITS funds to private banks, family offices and pension funds. Madilean currently focuses on private markets and direct investments.