The wealth channel buildout everyone in private markets is betting on has a plumbing problem.
Evergreen funds are growing fast. Roughly 300 products, ~$550 billion in AUM and demand from wealth platforms that is real and accelerating. These vehicles are designed to bring private markets within the reach of everyday portfolios, but the infrastructure underneath them was built for institutions writing $50M+ checks, not hundreds of thousands of investors at lower minimums.
The NIGO rate (orders failing on documentation, compliance, or funding before they ever clear) sits at 8%. Every subscription flows bilaterally between advisor, custodian and transfer agent. At the scale this market needs to reach, that system breaks.
Ben Haber is co-founder and CEO of Monark Markets. He started building it as a sophomore at NYU. On graduation day, he skipped the ceremony to close on the assets of a bankrupt fintech instead. That deal crystallized the thesis: private markets don’t need a better interface. They need better rails.
His answer is omnibus: one account per fund per custodian, netting all orders rather than processing each one individually. The structure Schwab built for mutual funds with OneSource, applied to private markets.
In this episode of the Modern Capital Podcast, Ben and Marc cover:
- Why the "Robinhood for alts" D2C wave failed and why competing with Fidelity and Schwab for the same customer was never going to work
- Why evergreen funds cannot sit inside model portfolios without omnibus underneath them
- How the pending paperwork crisis in private markets can be solved by simply removing the paperwork
"One omnibus account per fund, per custodian... dramatically less than the hundreds of thousands or millions of individual accounts the transfer agent would need to record. A real ability to actually scale the evergreen fund market in a way that is simply not possible today."
The wealth channel opportunity is well understood. This conversation is about what has to get built before it gets there.
