InvestCloud commits $50 million to cut the paperwork between advisers and private markets

Henderson's case is about scale. "You know, depending on what underlying analyst report you're looking at, we're somewhere between $13 trillion and $15 trillion in alternatives and privates today," he said ^[4]. "If that is ever going to mirror the public equities and be north of $100 trillion, you need an entirely different infrastructure that supports every element of the transaction life cycle" ^[5]. In his telling, evaluating options, completing transactions, managing investments and reporting results often run on separate systems today. The diagnosis comes from a company that sells the fix: joining those systems is part of Gridline's mission ^[3].

Cerulli expects $2 trillion of new adviser commitments over five years, on top of roughly $2.2 trillion already placed for clients ^[7]. That would bring the total to about $4.2 trillion ^[2]. Spread evenly, the new money is about $400 billion a year ^[3]. InvestCloud's $50 million for its Altic and PM+ offerings ^[10] comes to about 0.0125% of one of those years ^[4]. It is the only spending figure in the report ^[10].

The rest of the recent activity was product. Raymond James opened portfolios mixing private and public investments to its advisers for wealthy and ultrawealthy clients ^[8]. AssetMark added two interval funds, which let investors take money out at set periods, to a lineup covering private credit, real estate, infrastructure and private equity ^[9]. Both put private assets inside a portfolio or fund an adviser can allocate to ^[8][9].

Tim Buchner, Altic's chief operating officer, said the team is building a rules-governed system with protections similar to those investors get in stocks and bonds ^[11]. He described what it replaces. "It's very paper heavy," Buchner said. "And sometimes they have to pick up the phone and talk to their advisor and look at thousands of pages of documents. That's what we're getting away from." ^[12] Public markets removed barriers like these well over 30 years ago, he said ^[13].

The SEC is working to lower the regulatory hurdles to private-market investing ^[1], and the $2 trillion can arrive by more than one route. Most of it could flow through wrappers like AssetMark's, leaving software as a modest cost at managers that already run funds. It could stall on operations, as Henderson argues, in which case commitments the size of InvestCloud's would multiply. Or looser rules could let advisers put clients into individual deals, and the paperwork Buchner describes would land on many more clients.

I think the wrapper route takes most of the near-term money, because the launches so far have been products and the one disclosed technology budget is $50 million ^[8][9][10]. The counter-case is Cerulli's survey: 57% of managers now call alternative access a priority, up from 40% a year earlier ^[6][1], and a commitment that broad could turn into platform spending. Several more disclosed commitments at InvestCloud's scale or larger over the next year would put the bottleneck where Henderson says it is.