Sliced Investing has broadened its online alternative investments platform with this week’s launch of a program focused on registered investment advisors.

The program, called Sliced Institutional, enables advisors to access more than 40 private offerings from hedge funds and private-equity funds.

“What we’re trying to build is something like an exchange for alternative investments that make it almost as easy as investing in a stock or bond on E*TRADE,” says Mike Furlong, CEO and co-founder of Sliced. “An advisor can chose a fund to invest in, select a client they want to invest on behalf of, and just make the investment versus the traditional process that entails knowing the right people to gain access to a fund and filling out the various forms that come with private investments.”

Sliced says its new platform automates all of the manual processes typically associated with private fund investing such as subscription document signing, reporting, custodial integrations and the integration of customer relationship management software.

Based in San Francisco and started last summer by Furlong and Akhil Lodha, both former Citigroup traders, Sliced aims to leverage the operational efficiencies of the Internet to make alternative investments in hedge funds and private-equity funds more accessible and affordable to the masses––albeit accredited investors among the masses who have earned more than $200,000 in each of the prior two years or have a liquid net worth exceeding $1 million. (And, in the case of some funds, qualified purchasers with more than $5 million in investments).

In addition to its new RIA-focused offering, the company operates an existing platform for high-net-worth investors. Sliced has two different product structures that apply to both platforms: either invest directly into a hedge fund or private-equity fund, or invest via pooled assets through a feeder fund providing access to a large fund with substantially greater investment minimums than the $10,000 minimum required by both of Sliced’s platforms.

The name “Sliced” references the company’s goal to pare down the high minimum investments associated with hedge fund and private-equity investments.

The program for high-net-worth investors offers 11 fund options, or roughly one-quarter less than the RIA-focused program.

“If the investment is made directly into a manager, we charge no fee on top; we act as a broker and get paid a commission by the hedge fund manager,” Furlong says. (Investors still pay the fees charged by the funds they're investing in.)

Sliced charges 50 to 100 basis points for investing through the feeder funds, and investors pay additional fees charged by the underlying funds.

“In some situations we can get fee-sharing arrangements with the funds because we’re aggregating assets from a number of investors, so the total cost to the advisors may not be 50 to 100 basis points,” Furlong says.

Regarding fees charged by hedge funds, Furlong notes that fee pressures within the industry are compressing the traditional 2 percent management fee/20 percent performance fee format, and as a result the average fees across the Sliced platform are about 1.5 and 15 percent. “In some situations, we’re able to negotiate that lower,” he says.

Liquidity on the Sliced platform varies from five- to 10-year lockups for some private-equity funds, to hedge funds with either monthly or quarterly liquidity.

Furlong says more than 3,000 investors have signed up for the high-net-worth platform, with total assets in the “double-digit million-dollar” range.

On the RIA side, he says Sliced executives selected a few advisors they knew from their personal network who expressed interest in participating in the beta version of the advisor program that began a couple of months ago.

Now that the program is live, Furlong says they have a waiting list of advisors they expect to be onboarding soon. He notes the majority of the funds on the RIA platform are approved at the major custodians it works with––Schwab, Fidelity and TD Ameritrade.

Sliced’s partners in the RIA program include Krusen Capital, a New York City-based alternative investments advisory firm that has a number of feeder funds enabling investors to access brand-name hedge funds or private-equity funds.

Sliced also employs the services of Atrato Advisors, a New York-based alternative investments research firm that’s providing due diligence on the funds on the Sliced platform.