A few weeks ago Addepar announced the launch of Marketplace, a digital platform that supplements our reporting capabilities and gives our clients access to a wide range of financial products. Our launch partners cover cash management, hedge funds and private equity, and secondary trading in private securities and LP interests. I’ve been excited to see our clients’ enthusiasm for the application and our vision for where it’s headed. In this blog post, I’ll share some background on how Marketplace fits into Addepar’s broader mission, outline current offerings and functionality, and offer a glimpse of where we plan on taking it in the future.

Marketplace and Addepar's Mission to Empower Investors

Addepar was founded in 2009, in the wake of the global financial crisis, with a mission to empower clients to make confident, data-driven investment decisions using best in class technology. It was immediately clear that one of the most pressing problems for those managing complex portfolios was the lack of a high-quality way to aggregate all their investments into one place and easily report results to stakeholders. Addepar has spent the past ten years obsessively focused on this problem, and has created what we believe is the industry’s best portfolio reporting platform as a result.

Marketplace is the next phase in fulfilling our mission. In early 2019, we established Acervus Securities, a wholly-owned subsidiary, to facilitate client transactions in a unified and convenient way. This enables us to connect Addepar’s intuitive “rear-view mirror” analysis and reporting features with powerful “windshield and headlights” capabilities that a client can use to consider and act upon a range of investment opportunities. These capabilities are all built on Addepar’s core data platform and calculation engines.

A Digital and Integrated Marketplace

Marketplace, offered through Acervus Securities, is a new application that allows Addepar clients to view and evaluate investment opportunities, and digitally initiate transactions in financial products through our trusted partners. Its core value proposition is to provide one place for a client to view a broad range of financial products and providers, as well as relevant information on each, digitize workflows and provide operations professionals with tools such as common investor profiles, digital subscription documents, and order tracking across all stages of a transaction, and seamlessly upload Marketplace transactions back into a client’s Addepar instance.

We’ve curated an initial set of partners and products available in Marketplace to cover investment opportunities that our clients most often seek. The categories at launch are:

  • Hedge funds and private equity funds

  • Secondary market for LP fund interests

  • Secondary transactions in private companies

  • Cash deposit programs

We selected these areas to start because our clients’ investors are heavily weighted to alternatives and other private assets - over 35% of their total portfolios - and these are products that are traditionally challenging to access in a digital way. We expect to add additional partners and product categories in the future, based on what our clients tell us they want to see.

It’s important to note that neither Addepar nor Acervus Securities is manufacturing its own financial products. We are committed to an open architecture model, where we offer a range of quality product providers in each investment area, and let our clients choose the product and provider that is the best fit for their needs. There is no additional fee for an Addepar client to access and transact via our Marketplace.

We look forward to spotlighting our current partners in upcoming blog posts, so you can learn more about them and what they offer in their own words.

Our Longer-Term Vision

We’re excited about the functionality and investment offerings we’re offering at launch, but our vision for Marketplace goes far beyond its current state. We want to provide our Marketplace clients with a real order management system (“OMS”) style functionality across all alternatives product types, so they can manage their transactions in a much more digital and error-free way. We also plan to offer more breadth (i.e., range of product categories) and depth (i.e., number of partners per category) to the Marketplace, to increase transparency and choice for our clients in a larger and larger part of their portfolio. More broadly, we envision a future where asset allocation and security selection, proposal generation, portfolio construction and execution, and reporting can all occur in a frictionless way from anywhere, with Marketplace seamlessly integrated into that overall workflow.

Finally, given the size of the Addepar network, and the caliber of investors it includes, we see tremendous potential in facilitating connections and community among our clients. For clients who are interested, we want to help them share intelligence, transact with one another, or co-invest together.

I’m excited to be a part of this next phase of Addepar’s evolution. For those interested in learning more, please contact your Account Manager, or reach out to us directly at info@acervussecurities.com.

Brokerage services provided by Acervus Securities, an SEC-registered broker-dealer and member FINRA/SIPC, an Addepar company. Acervus Securities, Inc. is not acting as a municipal advisor and the opinions or views contained herein are not intended to be, and do not constitute, advice within the meaning of Section 975 of the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act. This article, and any attachments, is not an offer, or solicitation of an offer, to buy or sell any security or other product. The information provided is subject to change without notice.