NEW YORK – July 24, 2017 – iCapital Network, the financial technology platform democratizing alternative investments for high-net-worth individuals and their financial advisors, today announced that Morgan Stanley Investment Management (NYSE: MS) has invested in the company’s latest funding round as part of a broader commercial relationship. Morgan Stanley’s investment, together with investments from UBS Financial Services, Inc. (NYSE: UBS) and lead investor BlackRock (NYSE: BLK), brings iCapital’s total funding to date to over $50 million.
iCapital’s online platform offers investors and their advisors access to select alternative investments such as hedge funds and private equity funds. The platform is powered by iCapital’s end-to-end technology solution, which automates the unique subscription, administration and reporting processes of these investments and allows the high-net-worth community to bypass the complicated procedural hurdles that often come with private investments. The firm will use this latest capital infusion to further enhance its platform as both an operational solution for the wealth management community and as a conduit between high-net-worth investors and capital managers.
Morgan Stanley Investment Management plans to leverage iCapital’s proprietary technology and services both to access advisors and their clients and to streamline and automate aspects of their private fund operations, thus reinforcing the global bank’s commitment to providing the most efficient, innovative solutions to its financial advisors and clients.
“Our strategic partnerships represent industry confidence in iCapital’s technology-led approach to solving the long-standing obstacles that prevent individual investors from accessing institutional-caliber investments,” said Lawrence Calcano, Chief Executive Officer of iCapital Network.
“We are honored to work with companies like Morgan Stanley who believe in and work toward our mission of democratizing access to alternative investments.” “Endowments and pension funds have long embraced alternatives as an important component of their overall investment programs. Many high-net-worth investors, in our view, are under-allocated to alternatives relative to their institutional counterparts,” noted Dan Simkowitz, Head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management
. “iCapital’s technology and investment platform successfully removes many of the operational impediments that high-net-worth investors face when seeking to increase their commitments to these strategies. In doing so, we believe that iCapital has significantly improved the client experience for individual investors and those who serve them.”