Home Capital Raising & Corporate Finance Global Salon: Building the Rails for a $3.5 Trillion Empire
Apex Group’s Peter Hughes on AI hype, tokenization, private credit and what Jeff Bezos got wrong.
Peter Hughes founded Apex Group Ltd. in Bermuda in 2003. Today, it manages more than $3.5 trillion in assets across 52 countries, with 100-plus offices, 13,000 employees, and 90 regulatory licenses—growth built on more than 50 acquisitions over eight years and a bet Hughes made roughly five years ago that traditional finance and decentralized finance, or DeFi, were headed for convergence, not collision.
In this conversation with Global Finance, Hughes—who spent time at KPMG and Hemisphere Management before founding Apex—traces that bet from BlackRock Inc.’s decision to add bitcoin to its balance sheet to Apex’s enabling the development of the compliance-focused Layer 2 blockchain initiative, T-Rex. He pushes back on Jeff Bezos’s prediction of an artificial intelligence-driven labor shortage, defends private credit against claims that it’s a broken asset class, and argues that traditional exchanges and crypto-native platforms are racing toward the same end state.
Global Finance: Was there a critical moment or aha moment that sparked a major change in your firm?
Peter Hughes: Absolutely. Bridging traditional finance and DeFi has been my focus for five years. Before that, we serviced crypto funds investing in bitcoin, working strictly with regulated partners to manage risk. I wasn’t sure if crypto would go mainstream, but seeing BlackRock put bitcoin on its balance sheet five years ago proved it was here to stay. That was the turning point.
We later ran a project with a client, lowering a fund’s subscription minimum in Luxembourg from 1 million Swiss francs to 1,000 so more people could access it. That was great, but our real value proposition lay in our scale—we operate across 50 countries under 35 regulators.
So you take something that’s high risk, like crypto, and then you say, “Well, actually, if it’s regulated and you’ve got clean AML around it, it’s a digital asset, and then it becomes accessible for everyone.” From there, I focused on building the distribution rails. We are now approved in 20 jurisdictions for on-chain transfer agency, enabling seamless settlement of digital securities. Our target by next year is a platform giving funds access to 50 new distribution channels across wealth, retirement, retail, and crypto-native channels. As tokenized money market funds transition to a 24/7/365 operational model, the broader asset world will inevitably follow. Building these locked-in distribution rails today ensures a highly valuable position for the future.
GF: Has blockchain changed the way your business operates, and do you see it likely becoming more integral in the future?
Hughes: Blockchain is the end state for how everything ends up; crypto is just a small piece of what we service. We focus on the regulated side—digital assets backed by clean AML.
My view is that everything will move on-chain, creating cheaper fund structures and frictionless finance. But that only works in a regulated environment. We favor public, permissioned chains because you know where the money is coming from, where it’s going, and that it’s clean. We supported the launch of the Layer 2 compliance initiative, T-Rex, which is operated by an independent foundation, to validate that every transaction moving across ch…