SMArtX Advisory Solutions revealed that it integrated semi-liquid alternative investments into its UMA last year.
The semi-liquid alternatives available through SMArtX include interval funds and tender offer funds, and encompass strategies ranging from private equity to private credit and real estate. These options can be integrated alongside ETFs, mutual funds, SMAs and direct indexing within a single tax-managed custodial account. They are available across rep-directed sleeves, proprietary models and third-party portfolios.
SMArtX first introduced these private market funds to select clients in 2024. They are now broadly available.
SMArtX has automated trade controls and redemption scheduling, along with trade execution, cash management and compliance, to remove the operational bottlenecks that can prevent RIAs from scaling up the use of semi-liquid vehicles within UMAs. The platform also aligns alternative fund activity with tax-loss harvesting, tax transition and tax-aware rebalancing.
“Supporting semi-liquid funds inside model portfolios gives advisors a practical, scalable way to include private markets in everyday portfolio construction,” said Alex Thompson, the firm’s chief product officer, in a statement. “We’ve removed the historical barriers that made this difficult and made alternatives manageable at scale.”
Earlier this year, SMArtX partnered with BondBloxx to construct and distribute multi-asset model portfolios to financial advisors. The deal gave the company access to BondBloxx’s fixed-income ETFs. In 2024, the company also added at least 54 new strategies to its UMA, including various equity exposures and direct indexing themes.
The fintech world has been awash in announcements about adding private market assets to custom model portfolios, UMAs and SMAs. This is happening as the wealth management industry increasingly turns to semi-liquid funds to provide clients with exposure to alternative investments. Earlier this week, Fidelity struck a strategic deal to offer custom model portfolios that will include private market assets through Vestmark’s platform. (The news follows on the heels of Fidelity’s similar move to provide alternative investment options in its custom models to RIAs and broker/dealers through the Envestnet platform.)Two weeks ago, Vestmark announced that it partnered with alternative investment platform iCapital and asset management giant BlackRock to add private market assets to its tax-managed UMAs for RIAs on the Dynasty Financial Partners’ network. The deal appeared to build on an earlier Vestmark partnership with BlackRock to provide custom models for advisors.
Vestmark’s rival Envestnet also struck deals with BlackRock, Franklin Templeton, State Street Global Advisors and Fidelity to develop custom investment portfolios for advisors using its platform. In a similar vein, last year, Goldman Sachs Asset Management partnered with TAMP firm GeoWealth to build open-architecture custom models for the latter’s UMA platform.
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