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OPERATIONS • EXECUTION • SCALE
For most RIAs, the question of whether to allocate to private markets has already been answered. Survey data cited by KKR, drawing from Cerulli, found that 28.7% of RIAs expected to increase private market allocations by 2026, even as average allocations sat at just 2.3%. The conviction is there. The intention is there. What often isn’t there is an operational foundation that makes it practical to act.
This piece is about that gap: what causes it, what it actually costs advisors, and what the path forward looks like for firms ready to move beyond the 2.3%.
Most advisors don’t need to be convinced that private markets belong in client portfolios. They already understand the case for diversification, for accessing return streams that don’t move in lockstep with public markets, for building differentiated client relationships around a more complete portfolio.
The question they’re actually wrestling with is more practical: Can our team handle this cleanly?
For many firms, the honest answer is: not yet. Not with the systems and workflows they have today.
Private investments don’t behave like public ones. They come with subscription documents, capital calls, irregular distributions, inconsistent reporting formats, and a lifecycle that plays out over years. Each one has to be tracked, documented, and reconciled in ways that hold up to internal review and regulatory examination.
Without infrastructure designed specifically for this, those requirements fall on people, usually a small number of people who end up owning an ever-growing manual process. When those people are stretched, important things slip. And in a regulatory environment that has made private fund oversight a stated examination priority, slipping isn’t an option.
The SEC’s Examination Priorities are explicit: advisers to private funds remain a focus area, particularly around disclosures, fiduciary obligations, and the accuracy of fee and expense calculations. That’s not a distant concern. It’s the environment your operations team is already working in.
The operational challenges in private markets aren’t mysterious. They tend to show up the same way across firms:
Individually, each of these is a nuisance. Collectively, they’re a ceiling on how much private market activity a firm can realistically support, and a liability if something goes wrong.
And this operational strain compounds as firms grow. Schwab’s 2024 RIA Benchmarking Study, drawing on data from 1,304 firms representing $2 trillion in AUM, projected that the industry would need to hire more than 70,000 new staff over the next five years at current growth rates. Headcount helps, but it doesn’t solve a process problem. If the underlying workflow is fragmented, adding people mostly adds more points of failure.
The firms that have moved through this transition and made private markets a meaningful, manageable part of their practice; tend to share a few things in common. They’ve built or adopted infrastructure that treats private investments as a distinct operational category, not a variation of the public market workflows they already have.
In practice, that means four things:
Not a folder, not an inbox thread. Each investment needs a coherent record that ties together diligence materials, subscription documents, capital activity, statements, and client participation from day one through the end of the investment lifecycle.
Private funds report in inconsistent formats. Good infrastructure normalizes that by converting fund-level data into comparable fields that can actually support oversight, client reporting, and internal review.
Capital calls, distributions, and investor notices should live in a process with clear ownership and timing, not buried in someone’s email, dependent on that person being available and on top of it.
Having the files isn’t enough. Firms need to be able to walk a regulator or a senior partner through the investment decision and the lifecycle that followed, consistently, from any investment, at any time. That only happens when the process was designed to be reproducible, not reconstructed after the fact.
Citizen Mint was built on a straightforward premise: the private markets opportunity is real, but it only becomes accessible to RIAs when access and operations are solved together. Product availability alone doesn’t move the needle. Implementation capability does.
Our platform is designed around that reality. From the moment an advisor identifies an opportunity through Citizen Mint, from onboarding through investment completion, capital activity, and ongoing reporting, the experience is built to be intuitive and centralized. Advisors don’t have to stitch together a workflow from separate systems. The workflow is already there.
We review hundreds of investments annually and apply a rigorous five-step diligence process before anything reaches the platform. But our diligence doesn’t stop at the investment itself. We evaluate operational considerations as part of that review, specifically to ensure that what we bring to advisors can actually be implemented cleanly within their existing practice.
The result, in practice, is a different kind of experience for the teams that work with us:
For operations teams:
For advisors:
Private markets shouldn’t require a firm to choose between investment quality and operational sanity. At Citizen Mint, we believe the best platforms deliver both.
The growth of private markets in advisor portfolios won’t be settled by product availability. There’s no shortage of private market products. What will determine which firms actually capitalize on this moment, and which ones stay stuck at 2.3%, is whether they’ve built the operational capacity to support implementation at scale.
That shifts the key question from “Should our clients have private market exposure?” to something more useful:
“Can our firm support private markets in a way that is clean, scalable, and repeatable?”
When the answer is yes, everything changes. Investment teams can focus on judgment rather than administration. Advisors can focus on client fit and portfolio construction rather than chasing paperwork. Operations can focus on oversight rather than document recovery. Compliance can focus on process integrity rather than trying to reconstruct what happened.
That’s not just a better operational experience. It’s a better model for building a durable private markets practice.
Private markets get talked about as an access problem. In most RIA firms, they’re really an operations problem.
The firms that build meaningful, lasting private markets practices will be the ones that treat implementation as seriously as they treat investment selection. They’ll be the ones whose operations teams move with confidence, whose advisors can execute without friction, and whose compliance teams aren’t left stitching together a story after the fact.
At Citizen Mint, that’s what we’re here to support. Strong due diligence matters and we invest heavily in it. But so does making private markets genuinely usable for the people who have to execute, document, report on, and stand behind the process every day. When those pieces come together, private markets stop being an operational burden and start being a competitive advantage.
That’s the opportunity in front of RIAs right now. We’d love to help you get there.
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Sign up now to access private market investments on Citizen Mint’s platform.