Access to alternatives is no longer the hard part. Alternatives already represent 20% to 40% of assets under management (AUM) at leading wealth management firms, and our latest data show that 68% of firms grew their illiquid alternatives business by 10% or more over the last 12 months. Platforms now put private holdings in the same account as everything else. The operations behind that account are the sticking point, and that is where the margin on higher-fee products is won or lost.
The managed account industry has spent two decades moving from separately managed accounts to unified managed accounts to household-level coordination. The next frontier is a single unified portfolio that combines public and private securities under one advisory framework. Building one raises architectural and operational challenges and changes how wealth firms construct, manage, and communicate investment strategies to clients.
Datos Insights clients, particularly bank wealth managers, are asking three questions about this shift. Here are our answers.
How do you actually operationalize a unified portfolio with private holdings?
Start with what vendors have already solved: access. Envestnet embeds interval funds in unified managed accounts (UMAs). Altruist launched an alternatives marketplace in June 2026 that offers private-market investments to all clients inside the same clearing and custody infrastructure as the rest of its platform. Vestmark’s July 2025 partnership with iCapital, BlackRock, and Dynasty produced a tax-managed UMA that holds semi-liquid alternatives alongside traditional securities in one custodial account, with capital calls, K-1s, and distributions handled on the same platform. Goldman Sachs Asset Management’s custom models on GeoWealth combine evergreen alternatives with mutual funds, ETFs, and separately managed accounts (SMAs) in a single account, with iCapital handling subscriptions.
Every new point of access adds work behind it: extracting data from fund documents, reconciling post-trade activity, and reporting public and private holdings in one view. Firms report that one operations employee can manually manage only 200 to 250 alternative positions, compared with more than 3,000 with automation. Broader access also spreads alternatives across more, smaller accounts, so positions grow faster than assets. Without automation, every increase in alternatives allocation demands proportional back-office headcount and erodes the margin on higher-fee products. Our view: automate the data layer before widening access, not after.
Investment is now flowing to that operations layer. In the 2026 Datos Impact Awards, Morgan Stanley describes automating “complex Alternative Investments statements, which are highly variable across the industry.” Canoe Intelligence reports asset-level data extraction across more than 13,000 funds. STP Investment Services built WealthSite to “make private markets a first-class asset class within a single, consolidated system of record.” Distribution platforms are moving the same way. iCapital has built out document extraction and onboarding through acquisitions, from AltExchange in 2024 to Passthrough in February 2026, because fund access alone does not remove the years of capital calls, statements, and K-1s that follow a subscription. Firms evaluating platforms should ask how each one ingests capital call notices, K-1s, and valuation reports.
Does unified portfolio management actually improve client outcomes, or just simplify our operations?
Yes, if the private-market data is current. Operations gain either way: automation lets one employee manage more than 3,000 positions instead of 200 to 250.
In the Vestmark and GeoWealth structures described above, clients and advisors get one liquidity view across private and liquid holdings. That view is only as current as the data beneath it. Datos Insights research finds that manual processing leaves complete private-market position data 60 to 90 days behind quarter-end. Automated platforms cut the lag to 15 to 20 days, in time for rebalancing decisions and client conversations.
A unified account with a stale private-market sleeve is a tidier account, not better advice. Firms that want the client benefit should measure data lag, not just the number of holdings shown, and make quarter-end turnaround a platform requirement.
How do advisors explain private holdings in a unified portfolio without oversimplifying or overwhelming clients?
Begin with what the advisor can put in front of the client. In these structures, capital calls, distributions, and redemption limits appear next to liquid holdings, so the conversation starts from one liquidity view instead of a stack of separate reports.
Three habits keep that conversation simple. First, lead with the timeline, not the strategy: when the client can get money out, when the next capital call is likely, and when the next redemption window opens. Second, describe lockups and redemption limits as plain rules about when and how much a client can withdraw, such as a quarterly window with a redemption cap, and set them next to the client’s expected cash needs instead of quoting fund documents. Third, limit the first conversation to what the client has to act on or plan around, and keep valuation methodology, fee detail, and fund-level exposure in a follow-up view for clients who want it.
The household view is getting easier to assemble as tools that aggregate a household’s alternatives data improve. The explanation still has to be right, which puts the weight back on the data. That is why we favor platforms that keep private holdings in the same system of record as liquid ones: the advisor explains one portfolio, not two.
What this means for 2027
The operations gap reaches bank wealth management firms in 2027, as access spreads across more, smaller accounts faster than manual teams can absorb them.
In a Datos Insights survey of 71 wealth management executives, 86% planned to increase 2026 spending on alternative investment infrastructure over 2024 levels: 59% substantially and 27% modestly. Advisor demand is part of the reason: executives report that advisors rate alternatives as highly important (72%), ahead of trust and estate services (62%). Expect that spending to carry into 2027 as firms shift from adding access to fixing the data layer.
For 2027, we recommend three steps: measure data lag, require quarter-end turnaround, and test how each vendor ingests fund documents. Firms that also build one governed data model across public and private holdings can scale household-level advice without back-office headcount rising in step with alternatives growth.
Want to learn more? See our Alternative Investment Document and Data Management Tools Market Navigator report for an in-depth look at tools that help firms manage their data.
