Wealth managers want private markets for their clients. That much has been settled for years. What has not been settled is how a fund actually reaches those clients without a team of people moving documents around by hand. Evergreen fund distribution breaks at the operations layer, not the demand layer, and until that gets fixed the access gap stays open.
Today Titanbay and Coller Capital announced a partnership that lets European wealth managers use Titanbay's technology to access and trade Coller's evergreen secondaries funds. This piece is about the problem that solves.
Why the wealth channel wants evergreen funds
A traditional closed-ended private equity fund asks an investor to commit capital, wait for it to be drawn, and accept that the money is locked up for a decade or more. That structure works for institutions with dedicated private markets teams. It works far less well for a private client portfolio that a wealth manager needs to rebalance, report on, and explain.
Evergreen funds change that. They are open for subscription on a regular cycle, they offer periodic redemption, and they invest from day one rather than calling capital over years. For a wealth manager, that is a structure that fits inside an existing portfolio construction process.
Appetite for these structures is not the constraint. The constraint sits further down.
Where evergreen fund distribution actually breaks
Here is what distributing an evergreen fund into the wealth channel looks like without purpose-built technology.
An asset manager agrees terms with a distributor. Subscription documents arrive as PDFs and get completed by hand. KYC and AML checks run over email, get rejected for missing fields, and get resubmitted. Dealing cycles are reconciled in spreadsheets. Redemption requests come in through a mailbox. Allocations are tracked in a document that one person owns and everyone else asks about.
Multiply that by every distributor a manager wants to reach, and by every client sitting behind each of those distributors, and the economics stop working. The operational cost of servicing the wealth channel exceeds what the channel returns.
This is why so many strong funds stay institutional. Not because private clients would not want them. Because the plumbing to reach private clients at scale did not exist.
The same problem shows up from the other direction. A wealth manager who wants to offer an evergreen fund has to take on manual subscription processing, manual onboarding, and ongoing servicing that sits outside their normal systems. Most decide it is not worth the operational drag for a single fund.
What secondaries add to the picture
Private equity secondaries are the buying and selling of existing stakes in private equity funds. They provide liquidity in an asset class that is otherwise illiquid for a decade or more, and they have become one of the fastest-growing segments of private markets.
For a private client, a secondaries portfolio has a particular appeal. The underlying assets are already seasoned rather than blind pool, the portfolio is diversified across managers and vintages, and the J-curve is shallower than a primary commitment. In an evergreen wrapper, that becomes a genuinely portfolio-friendly way into private equity.
Which makes the operational question more pressing, not less. The better the structure fits private wealth, the more it matters that it can actually be distributed there.
What TradeEngine does
TradeEngine is the first technology built to trade evergreen private markets funds at scale in Europe. It automates subscriptions, redemptions and allocations end to end, from client onboarding through to order processing and ongoing servicing.
It is worth being precise about what that is and is not. TradeEngine is not a marketplace, and Titanbay is not a venue where funds are listed for sale. It is technology that a distributor uses. The fund stays the manager's fund and the client relationship stays the distributor's. What changes is that the operational work of accessing and trading that fund stops being manual.
For an asset manager, that means reaching the wealth channel without adding headcount to service it. For a wealth manager, it means accessing, subscribing, redeeming and managing client allocations through the systems they already use, rather than through a separate manual process bolted onto the side.
The Titanbay platform data behind that: subscription documents completed in 30 seconds rather than 15 minutes, a KYC first-pass approval rate of 79 per cent against an industry norm closer to 10 per cent, and fund launches running at roughly 7 weeks rather than 12. Across the platform, Titanbay has supported the launch of 59+ funds across 40+ jurisdictions with 35+ distributors connected.
What the Coller Capital partnership shows
Coller Capital has focused exclusively on secondary investing since 1990 and is one of the largest dedicated investment teams in the asset class. Its Private Wealth Secondaries Solutions business offers perpetual funds to eligible private wealth investors globally.
Under the partnership, European wealth managers will be able to use Titanbay's technology to access and trade Coller Secondaries Funds, subscribing, redeeming and managing client allocations without the manual process that usually comes with it.
The point worth drawing out is not the logo pairing. It is what becomes possible when a leading secondaries manager and purpose-built operational technology meet. The manager gets reach into a channel that was previously uneconomic to serve. The wealth manager gets a fund that behaves like the rest of their book. Neither side takes on the manual overhead that used to be the price of entry.
What this means for you
If you are an asset manager with an evergreen fund: the question to ask is not whether wealth managers want your fund. It is what it would cost you operationally to serve them at scale, and whether that cost is one you should be carrying yourself.
If you are a wealth manager: the question is whether private markets can sit inside your existing operating model rather than alongside it. If offering a fund means adding a manual process, the answer has historically been no. That is the assumption worth revisiting.
Frequently asked questions
What is an evergreen fund?
An open-ended private markets fund that accepts subscriptions on a regular cycle and offers periodic redemption, rather than locking capital for a fixed term.
Why are evergreen funds hard to distribute to wealth managers?
The structures are suitable, but the operations are manual. Subscriptions, KYC, dealing cycles and redemptions are typically handled by hand, which makes servicing large numbers of private clients uneconomic.
What are private equity secondaries?
The buying and selling of existing stakes in private equity funds. They provide liquidity in an otherwise illiquid asset class and give investors exposure to already-seasoned, diversified portfolios.
What is TradeEngine?
Titanbay's technology for trading evergreen private markets funds at scale. Distributors use it to automate subscriptions, redemptions and allocations end to end, from client onboarding through to order processing and ongoing servicing. It is technology, not a marketplace.