iCapital expand advisors’ access to alternatives platform

Wealth technology provider iCapital has just made alternatives diversification a little easier for advisors who use its platform.

The global fintech provider announced that Architect, its portfolio construction tool geared toward alts and structured investments, is now available on its iCapital Marketplace platform.

With the move, the wealth technology firm has opened up alternative investment access to more than 350,000 financial advisors across the US wealth management industry.

“In building out the industry operating system for investing in private markets, we’ve been very thoughtful about how to give advisors an enhanced set of tools to supplement the ones they already have in the 60/40 world,” Lawrence Calcano, chairman and CEO of iCapital, said in a statement.

Promising a blend of intuitive design and advanced analytics, Architect gives users the ability to diversify their portfolios with a broad array of alternative asset classes and strategies – including private equity and hedge funds – alongside traditional stocks and bonds.

iCapital originally unveiled the tool – which integrates alternative and structured investments with traditional market portfolios – last July. That came shortly after it debuted the Marketplace platform, which offers turnkey access to alt investments.

Over the past six months, the tool has been undergoing extensive beta testing across a group of 300 wealth managers, which included more than 150 RIAs.

“Our goal is to make alternative assets available to all for whom the assets are suitable and appropriate because we believe that advisors and clients can benefit from exposure to these asset classes,” Calcano said.

Last month, iCapital announced a strategic partnership to integrate Architect into the Morningstar Advisor Workstation platform. Once that’s completed, an additional 170,000 advisors will have the opportunity to subscribe through Morningstar’s platform, significantly broadening their access to alternative investments.

In another collaboration, iCapital teamed up with Envestnet in April last year to make its structured investment offerings available to advisors on the latter’s network.

“The integration allows advisors to add fee-based structured investments into proposals, transact on those products and assess them next to more traditional asset classes without ever leaving the Envestnet ecosystem,” Dana D’Auria, co-chief investment officer at Envestnet and group president of Envestnet Solutions, said at the time.