SS&C recently attended the UK Private Capital Summit, where discussions repeatedly returned to the same central theme. How do you expand an asset class that was built for institutional investors to a mass retail audience? Much of that discussion aligns directly with the questions our new white paper explores, covering liquidity constraints, regulatory complexity, the demand for better investor reporting and the operational challenge of servicing large numbers of smaller investors at scale.
Value Is Shifting Away from Public Markets
The push to open private markets to individual investors isn't arbitrary. There has been a fundamental change in where economic value gets created. As more companies have chosen to stay private longer, with many having no intention of going public, the typical public company is now nearly three times larger than it was twenty years ago. A growing share of a company's value during its first decade of growth now accrues entirely in private markets, before public investors ever have access.
Individual investors currently allocate only around 5% of their portfolios to private markets, compared to 50% for institutional endowments. The Deloitte Center for Financial Services projects that, if recent trends continue, US retail investors' allocations to private capital will grow from an estimated $80 billion to $2.4 trillion by 2030. In the European Union, the figure is expected to more than triple, from €924 billion to €3.3 trillion. That gap between where retail investors are today and where they are headed is one of the most significant capital formation stories in financial services.
Regulatory Frameworks Are Creating New Access Points
Regulatory changes on both sides of the Atlantic are actively designed to accelerate the shift. In Europe, the European Long-Term Investment Fund (ELTIF) 2.0 amendments significantly expanded eligible assets and introduced greater flexibility around liquidity. The European Parliament projects ELTIF investment to reach €100 billion by 2028, and the majority of new launches have adopted evergreen, semi-liquid structures. The UK's Long-Term Asset Funds (LTAFs) are similarly designed to direct pension capital toward private markets. In the US, a 2025 executive order aims to expand alternative asset access within 401(k) plans, extending private market exposure to defined-contribution savers who have historically had none.
At the summit, however, it was clear that the patchwork of regulatory regimes across Europe creates real operational complexity for managers. Each jurisdiction has different requirements, and the burden of navigating them falls on fund managers who are simultaneously trying to build scalable distribution and investor servicing capabilities.
Retail Scale Demands More Than Product Design
Evergreen, open-ended funds have become the primary vehicle for retail access to private markets. But the infrastructure required to service a large, heterogeneous retail investor base is fundamentally different from what is needed to manage a concentrated pool of institutional limited partners.
Liquidity management alone creates significant complexity. Semi-liquid structures give retail investors periodic redemption windows, but they carry the risk of mismatches between redemption demand and portfolio liquidity. Beyond that, retail investors and their advisors are largely unfamiliar with private fund structures, which means managers bear greater responsibility for accessible, clear reporting. Communicating what underlying investments actually are, and what they mean for investors' portfolios, is an essential part of serving retail capital.
The operational infrastructure underneath all of this is where many managers are underprepared. The accounting and processing systems built for traditional private markets often lack the automation to handle large subscription volumes, frequent reporting cycles and investor-level servicing at retail scale. Technology is part of the answer, from fintech distribution platforms to longer-term prospects like tokenization. But the foundational capabilities for fund accounting, reporting and scale must be in place first.
To learn more about the structural forces driving these trends, download our white paper.