What Really Needs to Happen for Alts2Wealth to Become Mainstream

Executive Summary

• Alts2Wealth will not succeed through distribution alone -- it will require fundamental changes in how alternatives are onboarded, subscribed to, administered, reported, and understood.

• Four pillars must improve together for Alts2Wealth to become mainstream:

  • Technology and operational scale

  • Advisor and investor education

  • Data quality, analytics, and due diligence

  • Clearing and custody rails standardized and scaled

• Technology must make 3 low-scale operations highly scalable:

  • Onboarding (some work left to do)

  • Subscription (a lot of work left to do)

  • Post-investment administration (a lot of work left to do – much is contingent on improving the subscription phase)

  • Ideally, we need a unified, seamless system for maximum scale

  • Marketplaces, but not as much since we believe TAMPs will do most of the sourcing, research, and due diligence in the early days.

• Improved Education, which remains a critical constraint, as alternatives lack shared mental models and require clear explanation of risk, return drivers, liquidity trade-offs, and portfolio use.

• Improve data and analytics, which have challenges that are structural, driven by fragmented records, inconsistent definitions, limited lineage, and lagged reporting.

• Purpose-built Clearing and Custody that is clarified and standardized, preferably with external clearinghouses and/or distributed ledger replacing bi-lateral communication between investor and manager.

• Alts2Wealth is inevitable, but not automatic; success depends on coordinated progress across infrastructure, education, and data rather than incremental fixes or product proliferation. The people who need to step up to the plate at the moment are:

  • Managers

  • WealthTech platforms

  • Advisors

  • Data providers

  • Custodians

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