If you’ve been hearing more questions about private equity, private credit, and private real estate in client conversations lately, you’re not imagining it. Todd Rais, CAIA, Head of Research & CIO Support at Envestnet, says the demand is persistent, growing, and unmistakably advisor-driven. Private markets come up consistently across client conversations, and asset managers—whether dedicated private markets shops or traditional managers that have recently acquired those capabilities—are lining up to get in front of his research team to talk about it.
“Hands down—and this is probably no surprise—but alts,” Rais tells The Wealth Advisor’s Scott Martin when asked what dominates conversations today.
The difference is what “alts” now means. A decade ago, alternatives largely referred to hedge fund strategies inside ’40 Act wrappers. Today, the conversation has shifted decisively toward private markets, and the operational implications are far more complicated. Advisors want exposure, but they don’t want to dismantle the managed account structure that keeps portfolios disciplined, tax-aware, and scalable in the process.
At Envestnet, that tension is front and center, and the firm has spent considerable energy building infrastructure designed to resolve it. As Rais sees it, access is no longer the hurdle. Integration is.
A Liquidity Spectrum, Not an On/Off Switch
The starting point for any conversation about private markets access is understanding that not all private exposure looks the same—or behaves the same. Rais is quick to point out that private markets exposure isn’t binary. It exists along a continuum.
On one end sit traditional private placement drawdown funds—capital commitments, multiyear deployment schedules, and limited liquidity outside secondary markets. On the other end are interval funds, which provide periodic liquidity and trade electronically.
“Before, 12–13 years ago, when it was alts, it was hedge funds,” Rais explains. “Now alts has an entirely different meaning, and it’s private markets. So, how do you access private equity, private credit, and private real estate within some semiliquid wrappers as well?”
Interval funds have become one of the more practical bridges between private exposure and advisory infrastructure. They carry tickers, trade electronically, and commonly offer quarterly redemption windows. Unlike traditional private placements, interval funds do not require subscription documents or complex capital calls.
“I think they’ve existed for a while, but their popularity and the attention that they’re drawing and the newer strategies that are rolling out in that vehicle has really taken off as of late,” notes Rais.
Between interval funds and fully illiquid private placements sits a broad middle ground, he points out. The vehicles in that space—tender offer funds, non-traded real estate investment trusts (REITs), non-traded business development companies (BDCs), and certain perpetually offered retail 3(c)(7) structures, which carry slightly higher investor qualification requirements—aren’t as operationally straightforward as interval funds, but they’re not locked up in the traditional sense either. Each offers limited liquidity tied to defined trade windows or periodic tender offers, and Rais refers to the whole category generically as “limited trade window products.”
“Those are fairly easy to implement within advisory accounts because they offer some sort of semiliquid redemption feature, typically quarterly, and they trade electronically,” he says, referring to interval funds specifically. “So, they’re easier to implement within a managed account platform such as Envestnet.”
Where interval funds slot in relatively cleanly, the limited trade window category requires more deliberate infrastructure—systems that know when liquidity is available, when it isn’t, and how to sequence trades accordingly.
Who Owns the Trading?
Most advisors who’ve looked seriously at private markets allocations haven’t been deterred by the investment case—they’ve been put off by the operational reality of managing semiliquid vehicles inside a portfolio that also needs to handle required minimum distributions (RMDs), rebalances, and cash raises on demand.
When interval funds or tender offer vehicles are managed manually, advisors must monitor redemption calendars, sequence trades around RMDs and cash needs, and ensure rebalances do not violate liquidity constraints—a process that often means spreadsheets, reminders, and careful timing.
When semiliquid vehicles sit inside an Envestnet managed account, the platform absorbs that operational weight.
“When it’s on a managed account, Envestnet owns all of that,” Rais says. “We’re trading all those positions to target. There are obviously parameters you can put around each position to account for drift, but when any one of those is tripped, the Envestnet system knows, ‘Okay, I need to raise cash here and redeploy it here.’”
Trade windows are built directly into the trading engine. If an interval fund allows redemptions only during certain periods, the system stages trades accordingly. If a rebalance requires trimming a semiliquid position, the redemption request is aligned with the next available window.
In an advisor-traded program, none of those processes is automatic, and Rais is candid about what that means in practice. “If you’re investing in an account within that advisor-traded program, you would need to know about the trade dates, and it’s on the advisor to click the button on the appropriate trade date and figure out all the Excel calculus behind what positions do I need to trim, by how much, et cetera,” he observes.
Consider a common scenario: a client needs to satisfy an RMD. The system will liquidate daily liquid holdings first to meet the immediate cash need. If that shift creates an overweight to a semiliquid position, a future-dated trade is generated for the next redemption window. Once liquidity is received, proceeds are redeployed to bring the portfolio back to target.
The advisor doesn’t have to monitor the window. The platform does.
“So, we’ve baked in all the trade windows in our system to eliminate the need for the advisor to do anything, which is pretty slick,” says Rais. And given that the alternative is manually tracking redemption calendars and timing every trade by hand, it’s hard to argue otherwise.
Tax Logic Still Applies
One of the lingering assumptions about private markets exposure is that systematic tax management becomes harder once semiliquid vehicles enter the portfolio. Rais pushes back on that belief—not just conceptually but with specifics about how the Envestnet platform handles taxes.
Wash sale rules are enforced automatically. If an interval fund position is sold and new cash is deposited into the account within 30 days, the system will not repurchase that same position until the wash sale window has expired.
“That is baked in the system as well,” Rais notes. “For any of those securities within our system, if we’re trading it, we’ll prohibit wash sales from happening.”
In addition, interval fund positions can allow for tax lot designation when harvesting losses. The ability to identify alternate lots within the system can preserve a degree of tax optimization that many advisors assume disappears once private exposure is introduced.
Interval funds remain semiliquid—that constraint doesn’t change—but the trading logic wrapped around them continues to respect tax rules and portfolio targets in ways that feel familiar to advisors already running tax-managed strategies on the platform.
Guardrails That Facilitate the Right Conversations
Interval funds carry five-letter tickers. They trade electronically. On a screen, they resemble mutual funds or ETFs. That surface similarity can create risk if liquidity terms are overlooked.
“It’s conceivable that one can make its way into an account if the advisor’s not necessarily aware of what they accidentally get or type in a wrong ticker,” Rais explains. “The system’s designed to prevent that from happening.”
Adding a semiliquid security to a proposal or model triggers an active acknowledgment—the advisor must confirm awareness of the interval-based redemption structure before moving forward. Home offices can also configure allocation caps that limit how much exposure to semiliquid securities any single account may hold.
“We don’t want to see an account that’s 100% semiliquid because that’s going to jam everything up,” adds Rais. “So, we’ve offered some tools to the home offices so that they can control max allocations and position within a managed account.”
The point isn’t to restrict access. It’s to ensure alts allocations are deployed intentionally.
One Workflow, Start to Finish
Private markets allocations have historically fragmented the advisor experience—proposal built in one system, subscription paperwork handled in another, back-office coordination managed manually somewhere in between. Envestnet is working to consolidate the experience inside its advisory infrastructure.
Rais says the near-term road map is specific: within the first part of 2026, the firm expects to roll out functionality that processes subscription documents for tender offer funds, non-traded REITs, and 3(c)(7) structures directly within the Envestnet proposal workflow—prepopulated and sent for e-signature through a third-party integration, without the advisor ever toggling to an outside system. The vision, as Rais describes it, is fully end to end: an advisor builds a model inside Envestnet that includes a non-traded REIT, an interval fund, and a standard mix of liquid strategies, and the platform handles risk scoring, proposal generation, analytics, and all associated paperwork in one place.
“Our goal is you don’t need to leave Envestnet,” he says. “Let us be that back/middle office for you and focus on your clients because we’re trying to automate this as much as possible and pull all the pain out of the process.”
As more semiliquid structures are incorporated into advisory portfolios, the firm is working to streamline how subscription documents and related workflows interact with its proposal and managed account systems. The objective is consistency: centralized modeling, centralized oversight, and centralized execution wherever possible.
Access Is Only Half the Story
Operational efficiency does not eliminate complexity at the investment level. Private market vehicles often involve layered fee structures, capital structure nuances, and distribution methodologies that differ from those of traditional mutual funds—and advisors who don’t go in with eyes open risk presenting clients with performance or distribution figures that land differently than expected.
“They’re complex vehicles,” Rais acknowledges. “There are fee considerations. There are ways that some returns and distributions might be published that might not align with advisor expectations and client expectations. So, there’s a heavy weight or emphasis that needs to be placed on due diligence on these types of investments.”
As Envestnet’s platform broadens access to interval funds and other semiliquid vehicles, the firm’s research team is building an approved list of strategies that have undergone institutional review. Backing that effort is a team of more than 100 investment professionals overseeing more than $18 billion in managed assets, offering ready-to-hand institutional-grade research.
Advisors evaluating semiliquid private markets strategies can lean on that institutional diligence, rather than build their own from scratch, and use the approved list to narrow their selection set. Expanding access and maintaining research rigor aren’t competing priorities here—Envestnet is treating them as two sides of the same obligation.
The Bigger Shift
The advisors who’ve held back on private markets haven’t been waiting for a better investment thesis. They’ve been waiting for the operational story to make sense—for a way to incorporate semiliquid vehicles without blowing up the rebalancing workflow, the tax strategy, the compliance controls, and the client reporting they’ve spent years developing.
Envestnet has built toward each of those friction points specifically—automated trade window monitoring, wash sale rule enforcement, rebalance sequencing, concentration controls, and institutional research diligence, all inside the managed account framework advisors are already using.
Rais is direct about what the work is ultimately for—getting advisors to a place where private markets feel manageable. “It’s exciting to be able to deliver solutions to them and take some of the work off their plate,” he says.
Private markets will grow increasingly complex—the product universe is expanding, the structures are multiplying, and client demand isn’t slowing down. What Envestnet is building is a platform designed to absorb that complexity, so advisors don’t have to, giving them the infrastructure to say yes to private markets conversations with confidence rather than hesitation.
For more information, go to www.envestnet.com.
_____________________
Additional Resources
- Contact Envestnet
- Envestnet Solutions for RIAs
- Portfolio Personalization
- Wealth Management Platform
- Wealth Management Solutions
______________________
Disclosures
This is a paid advertisement. Envestnet has multiple paid engagements with The Wealth Advisor including payment for participation in America’s Best TAMPs, an annual directory of investment outsourcing organizations, with a minimum asset level of $200 million, catering to financial intermediaries.
The information, analysis, and opinions expressed herein are for general information only. Nothing contained in this video is intended to constitute legal, tax, securities, or investment advice, nor an opinion regarding the appropriateness of any investment, nor a solicitation of any type. Investing carries certain risks and there is no assurance that investing in accordance with the portfolios or strategies mentioned will provide positive performance over any period of time. Past performance is not indicative of future results.
Alternative Investments may have complex terms and features that are not easily understood and are not suitable for all investors. You should conduct your own due diligence to ensure you understand the features of the product before investing. Envestnet and its affiliates do not provide research or product oversight on alternative investments. As with all investments, there is no assurance that alternative investment strategies will achieve their objectives or protect against losses.
