Regulation of Advisers to Private Funds

One of the differences between the Senate and House financial reform bills is how they treat advisers to private equity funds. The Senate bill has an exemption for private equity and venture capital. The House bill only has an exemption for venture capital. Since I work for a private equity firm, I am very focused on how this gets resolved.

In reconciling the two bills at the conference, they removed the Senate exemption for private equity: Title IV as passed by the Senate conferees. They also agreed to the house provision creating an exemption from SEC registration for private fund advisers with less than $150 million dollars in assets under management. Those advisers will need to register and comply with state registration instead.

That means private equity fund advisers with more than $150 million in assets under management will need to register with the SEC as investment advisers and will be subject to the rules governing investment advisers.

The bill has not been passed yet, but it seems unlikely that they will be going back to further revise this section of the bill. There are much more contentious provisions that legislators still need to deal with.