The Omnibus Unlock: Selling Exposures

July 14, 2026

How model portfolios solve for the distribution of alts to the wealth channel, at scale

While this is outside my normal cadence of monthly newsletters, I think this topic is important enough to warrant its own edition. I’m referring, of course, to model portfolios, and the potential they have to become the primary delivery mechanism for alternative investments in the wealth channel, first for RIAs and ultimately for self-directed brokerages.

At this point we can all agree the demand for access to private markets is here and growing. According to Adams Street, 70% of financial Advisors expect a greater share of their clients to have more exposure to private markets over the next three years, up from 67% last year. The market has also aligned on the vehicle: roughly half of Advisors now prefer semi-liquid evergreen structures to access private markets, up from 44% in 2025. The evergreen fund universe encompasses NAV-priced vehicles across interval funds, tender offer funds, non-traded BDCs, registered 3c7 funds, Opcos, and non-traded REITs. Evergreen fund AUM stands at roughly $600B today and on a path to cross $3 trillion by 2030. Every major manager is leaning into the wrapper. Apollo, Blackstone, and KKR have each publicly targeted 30 to 50 percent of new flows from the wealth channel, and the evergreen structure is how they plan to get there. The advantages of evergreens are plentiful, but from a product perspective, evergreens are registered vehicles with no investor count cap, transparent NAVs, standardized reporting, and permanent capital that deploys the day it arrives.

But demand is not enough to drive real dollars into private markets. The gap between stated demand and actual allocation remains wide, and it comes down to a lack of foundational knowledge amongst Advisors and investors to make an investment decision. In Adams Street’s survey, 70% of Advisors agreed that “the complexity of private market investments hinders my ability to communicate with clients effectively.” A 2026 Private Markets Insight report puts it more bluntly: Advisors are the actual bottleneck. Only 16% say they feel very familiar with semi-liquid or evergreen structures, even as those structures approach $600 billion in assets, and only 24% of retail investors say they understand how private markets work at all.

Having worked closely with GPs and alternative asset managers navigating wealth channel distribution, I’ve come to view the core bottlenecks for evergreen fund managers as falling into two categories: sales and infrastructure. The sales bottleneck is driven primarily by the education and communication gap faced by Advisors that I described above. The infrastructure bottleneck is the operational plumbing underneath. Any distribution strategy that solves only one of them stalls. The combination of evergreen funds, omnibus trading infrastructure, and model portfolios is the clearest path I see to solving both at once.

What is a Model Portfolio?

Explained simply, a model portfolio is a set of weights assigned to securities selected by an investment professional (often called a model strategist) that rebalances to maintain that weighting. A 60/40 portfolio, with 60% in the S&P 500 and 40% in a fixed income ETF, is the simplest example. The model weights are then loaded into a model implementation platform, which trades and rebalances programmatically. If the S&P rallies and the weighting drifts to 65/35, the platform sells equity exposure and buys the bond ETF to restore the target 60/40 weighting.

Advisors lean on models heavily, especially when managing hundreds or thousands of smaller clients. Models make portfolio construction easier to explain; “Do you want a conservative or aggressive portfolio?” and easier to implement, because the actual trading is handled programmatically by the model implementation platform. As clients grow wealthier and more sophisticated, layers like tax-aware optimization get added on top.

The players enabling model portfolios can be broken down into three groups. Model strategists: OCIOs, home offices within wirehouses and scaled RIA aggregators, as well as third-party asset managers like Fidelity, BlackRock, Capital Group, and Morningstar. Model strategists pick the securities and weights that go into models. Model implementation platforms: InvestCloud, Envestnet, Vise, Charles River, 55ip and Altruist. These platforms facilitate the actual trading, rebalancing and market connectivity to manage the model. Custodians: Fidelity and Schwab loom large in the Independent RIA channel, with Altruist, Goldman, and TradePMR competing to win market share. Custodians hold client accounts and settle trades, holding assets and providing tax reporting and statements to investors. For evergreen fund managers, the challenge of fitting into models breaks down to the fact that most evergreen funds are not supported by the DTCC, the central clearing house powering US public markets. As a result, the backend infrastructure enabling the connectivity and transaction processing between model implementation platforms, custodians and the evergreen fund market is largely nascent and manual today.

How Strategists Solve the Sales Bottleneck

Go back to that 16% familiarity number. The industry’s answer to the education gap has mostly been more education: more webinars, more whitepapers, more due diligence portals. That approach asks every Advisor to become a private markets analyst. It will not scale.

Model strategists solve the problem differently, by removing the decision almost entirely from the Advisors desktop. “I’m recommending this model portfolio from Fidelity Asset Management, which includes up to 15% exposure to private markets” is a very different conversation with a client than “I think you should allocate 15% to private markets, and here’s a list of 20 alternative managers you’ve never heard of that I think are great.” The strategist’s existing brand, trust, and investment capabilities absorb the diligence burden. The Advisor communicates a portfolio, not an asset class. That is how the complexity objection, the one 70% of Advisors raised, gets retired: not by making every Advisor an expert, but by making expertise unnecessary at the point of sale. I’ll add a layer of nuance here, that Advisors to the UHNW whose core competency is portfolio management may take a more hands on approach to asset selection and diligence, whereas the model solution is primarily geared towards Advisors serving hundreds or thousands of HNW or MHNW clients at scale, which also happens to be the largest untapped source of wealth channel assets in play today.

The Scale of Opportunity

There is $16 trillion sitting in model portfolios today. Models are not a product category. They are how the wealth channel actually invests at scale. When an Advisor allocates, they are not picking tickers one account at a time. They are assigning clients to a model and letting the rebalancer do the work across thousands of accounts in a single action. Every asset class that made it into models got there the same way: it became a line item. Mutual funds did it through Fund/SERV. ETFs did it through the exchanges and CNS net-settlement. The asset classes that never became line items stayed on the margins, sold one subscription document at a time. Private market evergreen funds are at that exact fork right now, but the infrastructure to enable this seismic shift in asset allocation is still missing from the legacy stack.

The Problem is the Plumbing

Here is what buying an evergreen fund looks like today. An advisor pulls a 40 to 80 page subscription document from a sponsor portal. The investor completes it. Broker-dealer compliance reviews the packet and kicks it back about 8 percent of the time for wrong signatures, missed fields, or stale forms. The funds transfer agent receives the packet and re-keys the data manually. The custodian coordinates a wire to settle the trade. The TA matches the wire to the subscription packet and updates the cap table.

Seven handoffs. Four file formats. Four to six days from click to confirmed position, assuming nothing bounces. The industry trade error rate sits at 8% today, a blocker to scale on its own.

Now try to put that workflow inside a model. A rebalancer generates thousands of small buy and sell orders across accounts in seconds. The evergreen workflow cannot absorb a single one of them without a human touching paper. Motive Partners estimates there are 48,000 operational staff across the industry manually moving files between transfer agents, custodians, Advisors, and issuers. The headcount is the integration. That is not a distribution strategy. That is a bottleneck with a payroll.

This is why alts sit outside models today. Not because Advisors do not want the exposure, and not because models are an ineffective channel. Because the exposure cannot behave like a line item. The sales bottleneck is solved by the model strategist. The infrastructure bottleneck is what keeps the model from holding the asset.

Omnibus Makes Evergreen Funds a Line Item

The mutual fund industry solved this exact problem decades ago with omnibus sub-accounting: thousands of investors at the platform, one relationship at the fund. The custodian maintains the individual investor records. The fund sees a single position per custodian. Orders net inside the omnibus account before anything touches the fund.

Evergreen funds never got that layer. NSCC’s Fund/SERV was built for daily-liquidity mutual funds and does not accommodate the mechanics of interval and tender offer structures. So the market grew to half a trillion dollars on manual processes designed for institutional investors.

Building that omnibus layer for evergreen funds changes what the product can do inside a model:

Alts behave like any other sleeve. One omnibus account holds the allocation. Advisors allocate by theme, private credit, secondaries, infrastructure, rather than by ticker and subscription packet. Rebalancing across thousands of accounts becomes one action instead of thousands of documents. And because the strategist selects the funds inside the sleeve, the advisor who is one of the 84% not deeply familiar with evergreen structures never has to underwrite a manager alone.

Suitability and subscription move into software. Omnibus eliminates the physical movement of subscription documents. Eligibility and suitability data are captured digitally at the platform level, once. Minimums come down because the fund no longer carries the per-investor administrative load.

Order netting protects the fund and the investor at the same time. Daily buys and sells net inside the omnibus account without changing the net position at the fund. In the Q1 private credit liquidity crunch, gross redemption pressure hit 5 percent caps and gated roughly $6.5 billion, with queues stretching three to five quarters and headlines compounding the pressure. With netting, subscriptions offset redemptions before they ever reach the fund. Investors get liquidity from the platform. Managers see less pressure on NAV cycles and gates.

Settlement happens in minutes, not weeks. Every participant integrates once through APIs. Orders, fills, and positions reconcile continuously instead of through email, SFTP, and portal uploads.

Infrastructure, Not Another Wrapper

I want to be precise about what this is not, because the industry has a habit of solving distribution problems by launching new products. Omnibus is not a fund of funds, it is a brokerage infrastructure and sub-accounting technology.

A fund of funds adds a layer: a 1 to 2 percent wrapper fee on top of underlying fund fees, limited look-through, liquidity gated at the wrapper level, and a manager choosing your funds for you. The publicly traded closed-end fund experiments taught the same lesson from a different angle. Destiny Tech100 traded to a roughly 1,000 percent premium to NAV and then collapsed 87 percent from its peak. Blue Owl Capital II listed and immediately fell to a 23 percent discount to NAV. The rails worked. The wrapper killed the product. A closed wrapper around an open-ended asset decouples price from NAV and imports market volatility onto assets that are not actually volatile.

Omnibus removes layers instead of adding them. Investors hold direct beneficial ownership in the underlying fund. The strategist and advisor choose the exact funds to put into models. It is standardized rails for an entire asset class, not another product on top of products.

The Opportunity in Brokerage

While alternatives are primarily sold through the RIA channel today, at Monark we often imagine a world where any self-directed investor can buy into the same evergreen fund strategies from their brokerage app or platform - another massive distribution opportunity untapped by alternative asset managers today. The self-directed brokerage opportunity may still be a few years away, but it will be core to the broader proliferation of alternative investments to the masses.

A core segment of Monark’s business is the distribution of single-asset private company SPVs to self-directed investors through their brokerage platforms, which has allowed us to learn and think ahead to the inclusion of private equity, credit, real estate and infrastructure. It is clear that simplifying exposures and taking a model based allocation approach within the self-directed channel will serve the broadest population of investors. In practice, that probably looks like an “Invest in Private Equity” button on your mobile brokerage app, providing retail investors exposure to 5-10 top quartile evergreen fund managers with a single click. Behind the scenes, that experience will be powered by Omnibus trading infrastructure.

The Convergence Trade

Apollo CEO Marc Rowan stated it plainly: “We aren’t selling funds anymore. We’re selling exposures.”

That sentence only becomes operationally true when the exposure can live inside the systems Advisors already use, and when the Advisor can explain it in one sentence. $16 trillion in models. $600 billion in evergreens heading to $3 trillion. Advisor preference for the evergreen wrapper crossing 50%. The convergence of those numbers is the largest distribution opportunity in wealth management, and it is gated by exactly two bottlenecks: sales and infrastructure.

The model portfolio solves the sales bottleneck. The strategist’s brand carries the diligence, the model carries the conversation, and the education gap stops being every advisor’s individual problem. Omnibus solves the infrastructure bottleneck. The rebalancer trades the sleeve, the custodian nets the flows, and the fund sees one clean position.

No single player builds this alone. Managers need scale and permanent capital. Strategists need products they can underwrite once and distribute broadly. Distributors need products their Advisors will actually allocate to. Custodians need standardized Omnibus trade processing infrastructure. Investors need real liquidity. The rails have to be shared, and the participants have to be aligned.

That is the thesis we are building against at Monark. Because in private markets distribution, the plumbing is the product.