NEW YORK, Jan 31 (Reuters) -

Hg Capital LLC has hired Alan Cline, a former top executive at Vista Equity Partners, to lead the European private equity firm's push to ramp up dealmaking in North America, executives at Hg told Reuters on Tuesday.

Cline, who spent nearly 20 years at Vista Equity and was most recently a senior managing director, will serve as Hg's head of North America and will join the firm's management committee. In his new role, Cline will be tasked with pursing deals in the United States and Canada.

London-headquartered Hg has been expanding its footprint in the United States, aiming to take advantage of portfolio companies that often have large customers and markets in both Europe and North America, according to Matthew Brockman, managing partner at Hg. Hg has opened new offices in New York and San Francisco in the past four years.

Prior to his departure from Vista in December 2021, Cline served as co-head of its Endeavor Fund, which focuses on buying small enterprise software firms.

A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, Cline spent more than a decade spearheading Vista's Foundation Fund that also focuses on the enterprise software sector. He worked on numerous transactions such as Vista's acquisition of software firms Accruent, Autotask Corp, LogicMonitor, and Bullhorn.

Hg, which was originally known as Mercury Private Equity and was spun out of investment bank Merrill Lynch in 2001, has more than $55 billion in assets under management spread across technology, financial services software, and healthcare software in Europe and North America. (Reporting by Milana Vinn in San Francisco and Chibuike Oguh in New York; Editing by Anirban Sen and Jonathan Oatis)