How Tech is Demolishing Walls: Private Markets Go Retail in 2025

Wall Street's ivory tower is crumbling. Blockchain and tokenization are handing Main Street the wrecking ball.

From Illiquid to Instant

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Risks Behind the Revolution

Liquidity illusions, pump-and-dump DAOs, and 'accredited investor' loopholes big enough to drive a Lambo through. As always, Wall Street finds new ways to profit from your FOMO.

The bottom line: Private markets just went public—whether the old guard likes it or not.

In June this year Fidelity Investments introduced custom model portfolios with alternative investments to allow eligible wealth management firms to access private markets. However, the administration of private markets is still highly manual and inefficient and, as the scale of investment increases, more technology and automation will be needed, according to Andrew Tarver, president of the PMA Network at wealth technology provider InvestCloud.

In February this year InvestCloud said it formed a founding partnership with alternatives manager Apollo Global Management to activate the Private Markets Account Network, PMA Network, which combines public and private assets in a single platform for financial advisors and their clients. The PMA Network uses InvestCloud’s managed accounts platform, APL, to connect wealth managers to an array of alternative asset managers, making private markets products available for inclusion in portfolios including private credit, private equity, real estate, operating companies, interval funds, non-traded REITs and BDCs.

Fidelity found in a recent survey that nearly half, 46%, of advisers said they were very interested in a model portfolio that offers both traditional and alternative investments.

Amanda Robinson, Fidelity

Amanda Robinson, head of wealth advisory managed solutions distribution at Fidelity Investments, said in a statement: “Wealth managers are looking for opportunities to expand beyond traditional asset classes to diversify portfolios, but may see implementation of alternative investments as a complex process. Fidelity’s open-architecture, custom model portfolios can offer an efficient and tailored solution to help meet advisors’ and their clients’ needs.”

Tarver told Markets Market that the process for wealth advisors to allocate to private markets still involves a lot of manual intervention, reconciliation, paperwork, and wet signatures.

“The innovation in the industry in the last 12 months has been for the end client to sign one piece of paper, rather than five,” he added.

For example, once the allocation has been made the trades need to be booked, sent to the fund administrator and custodian and managed over their lifecycle, which could include regular redemptions for semi-liquid products.

“There is a lot of human intervention which will blow up quickly if there are hundreds of thousands of trades each month,” said Tarver.

In addition, Tarver said that between 8% and 10% of transactions in private markets fail, so technology is needed to drive this down to zero across inflows, redemptions and transfers. Therefore, the industry needs rules, standardization and governance in a digital format so everyone is using the same data for transactions, products and clients.

“We think there is going to be millions of private market trades each month in brokerage accounts within 24 months, so failure rates have to be zero,” he added. “Creating differentiated financial outcomes through connected, intelligent tech is a new paradigm – it’s not just a faster horse.”

Tarver compared the transformation as moving from manual card imprinters in shops, where cards were manually swiped in a machine with paper copies sent to banks, to digital card readers where shoppers just need to input their pin number for the the data to be automatically transmitted.

Andrrew Tarver, InvestCloud

“When a digital message is standardized across all the nodes in the network you remove errors, increase volume and reduce cost,” Tarver added. “We need to go from the card imprinter to the card reader.”

InvestCloud has built the APL platform which it said is the largest managed accounts platform in the U.S. with more than $3 trillion of assets across nearly 10 million accounts, and uses nearly 4 million models Therefore, a 10% shift in allocation to private markets just on APL equates to $300bn of inflows. Tarver said APL can be made available to the whole market to create standards and increase efficiency across the value chain.

State Street’s fourth annual study of private markets recently found that institutions are increasingly recognising the value of generative artificial intelligence and large language models in enhancing their private markets operations.

“While in last year’s survey only 58% of those surveyed said they saw the value in the technology, 83% are now planning out cases for the technology to generate analysable data out of unstructured private markets information from their operations,” added State Street. “Correspondingly, planned technology expenditure is up for the overwhelming majority, 69%, of respondents.”

Performance analysis is where most said the technology WOULD prove “most useful”, both at a portfolio level and for individual holdings. State Street said one third of respondents, 34%, agreed that technology development enabling more frequent, timely and high-quality data is an essential factor in making private markets accessible to a wide range of individual investors.

Chris Rowland, State Street

Chris Rowland, head of custody, digital and fund services product at State Street, said in a statement: “We believe that portfolio liquidity starts with data liquidity. This year’s results show that institutions are moving from hypothetical to real implementation of AI-based solutions in their private markets operations, and those at the forefront of this innovation will gain a significant advantage.”

Investcloud’s collaboration with Apollo enables wealth management clients to incorporate the fund manager’s private market model portfolios and multi-manager models into their managed account programs through its APL platform.

Jeff Yabuki, chairman and chief executive of InvestCloud, said in a statement: “By combining Apollo’s DEEP private market expertise with our leading technology, we are dramatically accelerating the integration of private markets into the wealth management landscape.”

Stephanie Drescher, partner and chief client & product development officer at Apollo Global Management, said in a statement that the convergence of private and public markets is shaping the future of wealth management. She added: “Apollo and other general partners within the PMA Network can gain unparalleled access to distribution channels, creating new possibilities for the entire ecosystem.”

Martin Kelly, chief financial officer at Apollo Global Management, said at the Morgan Stanley US Financials Conference in June this year that the fund manager is continuing to add people to its team including in origination, credit and global wealth.

Kelly said global wealth is the firm’s largest investment area. He added: “It’s a complicated ecosystem of having the right products, the right relationships with distributors and the right technology to service end customers.”

The opportunity for private credit is a $40 trillion marketplace and predominantly investment grade, according to Kelly, but adoption is in the early stage, with insurance companies as the most advanced.

Martin Kelly, Apollo

“Other institutional investors, generally speaking, are in the very early stage and it’s obviously a wealth opportunity as well,” Kelly added. ““The convergence of public, private in investment-grade private credit is at the very early stage and so that speaks to partnerships that we are creating, as are others in our industry, with traditional firms.”

In addition to Fidelity, BlackRock is aiming to increase wealth and retail investment in private markets. On 1 July 2025 BlackRock completed its acquisition of private credit manager HPS Investment Partners. Blackrock said in a statement that private credit is reshaping financial markets and the structural trends supporting its growth have accelerated the convergence of public and private markets and positioning asset managers to match long-dated capital with long-term investors, including insurance companies, pensions, sovereign wealth funds, wealth managers, and individuals saving for retirement.

Tarver said Blackrock is a client as an asset manager, with InvestCloud integrated into Aladdin, BlackRock’s technology platform.

“InvestCloud’s job is to connect wealth managers with asset managers,” added Tarver. “The more asset managers want to connect into wealth, the more relevant InvestCloud becomes.”

He predicts there will be multiple networks to connect into private markets with some asset managers adopting a closed model with their own infrastructure, and others forming partnerships with managed account platforms.

“We want to partner with some of those big brands in the custody and fund administration space,” said Tarver. “We also want to partner with firms who would be considered competitors in the managed account space to say ‘let’s do this together’ and not duplicate costs.”

Tarver expects private market allocations from wealth to begin flowing in the fourth quarter of this year and a number of flagship funds to live in 2026.

“I think you are going to see a lot of volume kick in, and we are really preparing for those big flagship funds to be launched,” said Tarver.