Private markets still carry friction that traditional markets left behind years ago. Our CEO Rafay Farooqui joined Tony Davidow on the Alternative Allocations podcast to talk about what it takes to fix it: less operational burden on advisors, one place to work from, and a standardized foundation that makes everything built on top of it faster.
Advisors Should Be Thinking About Portfolios, Not Paperwork
Traditional investments arrive digitally, settle quickly, and flow straight into reporting. The advisor’s job is analysis. Alternatives add logistics on top: documents, signatures, value updates, and knowing where to log in.
The real cost is mind share. A bad signing experience or a late value update can strain a client relationship before the product has a chance to do its job. Operations should be solved for the advisor, not carried by them.
Centralize First, Then Standardize
Today’s solutions are mostly point solutions. Data is slow, reporting is slow, documents are manual, and product availability is scattered across email, PDFs, and marketplaces. Piecing them together doesn’t fix the problem.
The starting point is centralization: products, workflows, system connections, and data in one place. Once the problem is in one place, standardization becomes a requirement, and the heavy lifting happens in the platform instead of falling to every party upstream and downstream. Skip those two steps and you are solving the problem backwards.
Build for the Hardest Case
Every private markets transaction needs three parties: the investor, the manager, and the service provider. They rarely share information, and every one of them has to complete a subscription document.
That common step is where to start. Digitize the data, documents, signatures, and workflows, and the same foundation serves institutions, managers, administrators, law firms, and wealth managers alike. Build for the most complex approval chains and simpler use cases come easily, because a firm can turn on only the steps it needs. Build for the simple case and it breaks on the complex one.
Once the Pipes Work, the Questions Change
When operations stop being the problem, advisors ask for something different: one place to see everything available across alternatives, whether it trades like a ticker or runs on a subscription document. They want education, pre-qualification, and approved accounts in the same view, and search that works by outcome, not just by strategy.
The next layer is data and pricing. Standardized operations paired with standardized data and pricing is the path toward private markets that work more like traditional ones.
Thank you to Tony and Franklin Templeton for a great conversation.
ABOUT SUBSCRIBE
SUBSCRIBE is a fintech company digitally transforming the landscape of alternative investments for fund managers, institutional investors, wealth managers, law firms, and fund administrators. Our platform technology modernizes the archaic infrastructure of private fund investments by delivering a central operating system — catering to every role within the investment process empowering them to connect any fund, any investor, anywhere in the world on a single platform.
