Callan, an institutional investment consulting firm, has appointed Harshal Shah, CFA, as a senior vice president in the firm’s Private Equity (PE) Research Group in its San Francisco office.
Shah most recently was a PE portfolio manager with the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CALPERS). Prior to that, he was a vice president for Strategic Investment Solutions (SIS, now Verus Advisory) specialising in direct PE consulting to large fund sponsors. He will report to Gary Robertson, SVP and manager of Callan’s Private Equity Research Group.
“Harshal is an experienced investment professional with a strong background in direct private equity investing as a fund sponsor and advising clients as an investment consultant, helping to implement high quality PE programs,” says Robertson. “His expertise spans investment vehicles, strategy types, and geographic regions. Harshal is a great addition to our team and will bring more of the plan sponsor limited partner’s perspective to our client work.
“Callan recognises the growing importance of PE in our clients’ portfolios and the significant resource requirement needed to properly implement and monitor the allocations. We are actively investing in our PE consulting team to ensure our clients’ future success. Harshal brings more than 28 years of investing experience to our clients, and embodies Callan’s core value of keeping clients’ interests first.”
Shah’s hiring comes on the heels of continued expansion within the Private Equity Research Group over the last two years. In addition to his hiring, the group added Jay Nayak as a senior PE researcher, a dedicated PE research analyst, and formed a pool of PE reporting analysts.
“Callan is dedicated to being a full-service consultant for our clients. This necessitates having expertise, experience, and analytical capabilities to assist clients in every institutional investment area,” says Butch Cliff, CFA, EVP and Callan’s Director of Research.
“Callan is a research-focused consulting firm, always on the lookout to hire high quality research professionals, recognised in their fields of expertise, who want to make a career out of research that helps clients. In particular, we are aggressively investing time and resources in enhancing the capacity of our entire private markets capabilities across every investment area – PE, real estate, hedge funds – and across all types of implementation models – direct and fund-of-funds. In addition to making strategic hires in these areas, we have been utilising our proprietary IT and Database resources to greatly enhance our private fund analytical and due-diligence capabilities as well as our performance reporting tools.”
Shah received a BA in Finance from California State University, Fullerton and has earned the right to use the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
