Thirty years of packaging alternative investments for wealth advisers, and the biggest mistake in the industry is still the same one I saw in the 1990s. Product teams build for institutions, hand the result to advisers, and wonder why it doesn't sell.
What has changed
The sophistication of wealth advisers. When I started packaging alternative investments for advisers, most portfolios were simple: equities, bonds, property and cash. Alternatives were a curiosity at the edge of the industry, and the tools to assess them barely existed outside institutions.
I remember asset consultants in 2004 recommending that advisers bolt a 10 per cent alternatives allocation onto a portfolio that was already fully invested in equities and bonds. Nobody could tell me what the client was supposed to sell to fund it.
Today's advisers are running genuinely diversified portfolios, asking sharper questions about liquidity, fees and manager alignment than many institutional gatekeepers I have sat across. The sophistication gap has closed.
What hasn't changed
The fallacy. Product manufacturers still treat advisers as a smaller, simpler version of an institutional client. Same product, same disclosure, same pitch, just smaller cheques and shorter meetings.
Advisers assess quality differently. They value different features. They have different alarm bells.
An institution is buying a return stream for a portfolio it controls. An adviser is making a promise to a client they will sit across from for the next twenty years. That difference changes everything: how they judge a manager, what liquidity means to them, which risks they can carry and which they cannot explain.
The answer isn't more product
It is packaging. The institutional-grade investment already exists; the work is wrapping it so an adviser can access it, allocate to it and validate it inside the way they actually run portfolios and client conversations.
That means structures advisers can hold, terms they can explain, education that respects their intelligence, and reporting that answers the questions their clients ask. Listen to what advisers need, then engineer the package around it. That is the discipline I have carried from Macquarie to every business I have built since.
Thirty years in, that's the opportunity I'm still excited about.
