CAIS, an alternative investment platform for independent financial advisors, launched its new software-as-a-service platform, CAIS Solutions, which will allow advisors to manage alternative investments in one spot, including those sourced through CAIS’s marketplace, but also ones purchased directly from managers or sourced on other alts platforms.
“This can be applied to all alts funds or products, no matter where you find them,” CAIS founder and CEO Matt Brown said in an interview. “You can take your back book and onboard it onto the platform. You can launch your own structured vehicle or feeder fund or custom fund. You can centralize your entire alts universe on a single platform.”
CAIS originally launched as an online marketplace for alternative investments. Advisors can vet investments—with third-party analysis from Mercer included—and subscribe through CAIS. They could also manage investments purchased through CAIS. The new software adds third-party fund management capabilities.
“If advisors can’t buy a fund on our platform, but they want the ease of use for that fund, what’s the solution there? And there wasn’t one. We figured out how we could make any fund they want to buy as easy as if it was on our platform,” Brown said.
Another driver, Brown said, is that CAIS noticed advisors were struggling with managing legacy positions in funds purchased several years ago. Many were still handling those processes manually.
“The rise of alt adoption was being stalled by the effort to manage the existing positions they were buying,” Brown said. CAIS Solutions is an effort to remedy that.
CAIS has been working on this product for about 18 months. It has 10 beta clients that have been using the product for the past six months, and will continue to add handfuls of firms to the platform over the coming months before making it more widely available.
CAIS Solutions includes two products: CAIS Trade, which manages alternative investment subscription processes, and CAIS Post-Trade, which advisors can use to monitor and manage data and documents tied to their alternative investments.
CAIS Solutions was unveiled at the 2023 CAIS Alternative Investment Summit in Los Angeles last week.