The asset management world is forever evolving, with new investment products and solutions being constantly introduced and existing ones being innovated on to fit to new markets and use cases. Financial advisors can serve as a sizeable distribution channel for those solutions, since a single advisor might work with 100 or more clients at $1 million or more of AUM each for whom they might implement a given investment product. Which is why it makes sense, for instance, for providers of investment solutions to spend tens of thousands of dollars on sponsorships and booths at national conferences, because getting even one advisor to sign up and implement the solution across their $100+ million of AUM can make up for the expense several times over.
But the challenge that new investment solutions often have is that in addition to needing to build visibility and credibility among advisors, they also need a way to plug into advisors' existing tech ecosystems. Advisors use one of a handful of custodians, plus any number of individual or all-in-one tools for portfolio analysis, proposal generation, rebalancing, performance reporting, and billing. If a particular investment solution isn't compatible with some or any of those tools, it becomes very difficult to implement it at scale because the hassle of doing so outweighs the potential benefits. And so advisors might decide to steer clear of certain investment solutions – even if they think they could otherwise be beneficial for their clients – if they don't see a way to implement them with the tools the advisor is already using.
In the early 2000s, Envestnet became successful at solving this problem for investment solutions like TAMPs and SMAs (and later a host of others from model portfolios to direct indexing and tax overlays to annuities). By providing a marketplace of investment solutions plus the technology to implement them, Envestnet solved both the advisors' problem of needing a way to connect their investment solutions to their custodians and other tech infrastructure, and the investment solutions providers' problem of needing a way to distribute to advisors and their clients. For which Envestnet made money from asset managers and investment solutions providers who paid to be on their platform and from advisors who paid SaaS fees for the technology.
But whereas in the late 1990s and early 2000s TAMPs and SMAs were the hot new product type that needed a solution for integrating with advisor technology in order to gain traction among clients of RIAs, today that distinction in many ways belongs to alternative investments like private equity and credit. And like TAMPs and SMAs back then, alternatives today have many data gaps between themselves and other parts of the advisor ecosystem, e.g., for doing due diligence and comparing alternatives managers, trading and administering alternative investments with their bespoke liquidity requirements and capital call schedules, and reporting performance in conjunction with the client's other assets. Although solutions exist at various points along this spectrum (e.g., Altidar, Blue Vault, and Alkymi for alternatives research and analytics; iCapital and CAIS for alternatives marketplaces; Bridge, Arch, and Canoe for back office administration; and Addepar and Masttro for reporting), a true end-to-end solution for alternatives hasn't emerged yet that can solve for both the specific challenges involved with alternatives as well as the "last mile" issue of integrating alternatives into advisors' existing technology infrastructure.
Which makes it notable that this month iAlta, an emerging provider aiming to unify the data infrastructure of alternatives investing, has announced the acquisition of the data management technology provider BridgeFT (not to be confused with the different Bridge that provides alternatives back office management technology).
iAlta was launched in 2025 by a group that notably includes Envestnet co-founder Bill Crager, and their goal appears to be to do for alternatives what Envestnet did for TAMPs and SMAs back in the early 2000s: To provide technology to make them easier for advisors to implement, and (presumably) make money from asset managers who are included their platform. Also like Envestnet, iAlta is taking the approach of buying rather than building the solutions it's aiming to provide across its platform, having already acquired two alternative investment data and administration providers in Verivend and Betterfront.
With the BridgeFT acquisition, iAlta will have a way to plug its prior acquisitions (which are specific to the alternatives universe) into the broader advisor technology ecosystem. BridgeFT's main specialty is building API connections to custodial platforms and normalizing the incoming client custodial data, allowing advisory firms and technology providers to integrate with multiple custodians using a single, standardized API. This capability could translate well to alternative investments, which also feature highly fragmented and nonstandardized data, but perhaps even more importantly it creates a connection – a bridge, if you will – to the existing custodial and technology ecosystem that advisors live in. Which helps to solve for the "last mile" problem that many alternatives solutions have of plugging into the tools that advisors already use so they can manage them as an integrated part of their clients' portfolios rather than as a separate sleeve with its own data and reporting tools.
It will be worth watching to see what iAlta does from here. While Crager has said that iAlta doesn't intend to build or buy a alternatives marketplace to compete with iCapital or CAIS or a reporting tool to compete with Addepar or Masttro, it's fair to wonder given his Envestnet roots whether the company will be able to resist trying to put together a complete end-to-end tool for alternatives instead of focusing solely on the data infrastructure alone. Although Envestnet's experience with trying to build an everything-for-everyone conglomerate by acquiring solutions and fitting them together into one puzzle, which ultimately became a liability to the company and led to its acquisition by Bain Capital, may serve as enough of a cautionary tale to keep iAlta focused on building a comparatively narrow data-only solution.
But the bottom line is that with the acquisition of BridgeFT, iAlta now has an important leg up with its ability to plug into a wide range of custodial platforms and advisor technology. Because ultimately, while tools like alternatives marketplaces and administration and reporting platforms may make alternatives investing easier in a vacuum, in the real world if you want to support alternatives investing for financial advisors you need to meet them where they are, with the custodians and technology that they already use. With the BridgeFT acquisition, it's clear that iAlta understands this concept – even if it isn't quite certain yet what they'll do with it.
This article first appeared on the Nerd’s Eye View at Kitces.com at https://kitc.es/advisortech-feb2026, and has been reprinted here with permission.
Ben Henry-Moreland
Ben Henry-Moreland is a Senior Financial Planning Nerd at Kitces.com, where he specializes in writing and speaking on financial planning topics including tax, practice management, and technology. He also co-authors the monthly Kitces #AdvisorTech column. Drawing from his experience as a financial planner and a solo advisory firm owner, Ben is passionate about fulfilling the site’s mission of making financial advicers better and more successful.
Michael Kitces
Michael Kitces is Head of Planning Strategy at Focus Partners Wealth, which provides an evidence-based approach to private wealth management for near- and current retirees, and Focus Partners Advisor Solutions, a turnkey wealth management services provider supporting thousands of independent financial advisors through the scaling phase of growth.
In addition, he is a co-founder of the XY Planning Network, AdvicePay, fpPathfinder, and New Planner Recruiting, the former Practitioner Editor of the Journal of Financial Planning, the host of the Financial Advisor Success podcast, and the publisher of the popular financial planning industry blog Nerd’s Eye View through his website Kitces.com, dedicated to advancing knowledge in financial planning. In 2010, Michael was recognized with one of the FPA’s “Heart of Financial Planning” awards for his dedication and work in advancing the profession.
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