New York-based iCapital Network announced on Thursday a deal that moves it significantly closer to its goal of democratizing alternative investments.
Certain J.P. Morgan alternative strategies will now be available for drastically reduced minimum investments on iCapital's digital platform. Whereas the strategies once required $10 million minimum investments, which made them available only to large institutions, iCapital will now make them available for $100,000 minimum investments, a level at which many private wealth investors will be able to participate.
“J.P. Morgan has a $1.7 trillion asset management business and a lot of alternatives that have performed well,” said Lawrence Calcano, CEO of iCapital. “Their interest is moving beyond the extremely high minimums they have to provide products and make them available in the right ways to the independent wealth channel.”
To do so, J.P. Morgan needed a technological solution, said Calcano, and that’s where iCapital fits in.
iCapital uses financial technology to efficiently offer hedge funds, private equity, private real estate and other alternative strategies to advisors and high-net-worth investors. These funds may be difficult for advisors to research because of their limited availability.
“Our objective is to be the industry architecture to enable the high-quality managers of alternative assets to interact with the advisory community, and to be the platform the advisory community uses to allocate alternatives for their clients,” said Calcano.
The platform, he added, allows an asset manager like J.P. Morgan to collect and consolidate all of its marketing materials for the strategies, thus allowing advisors to easily share information about investment opportunities with clients.
Calcano did not say which J.P Morgan strategies would now be available to advisors using the iCapital platform, as they are all private placements.
Under the arrangement, J.P. Morgan will allow iCapital’s users access to some strategies, and iCapital will act as a feeder vehicle to bundle their investments into larger amounts.
Calcano says that iCapital’s infrastructure is allowing individual investors to access institutional private placement strategies for the first time.