Streamlining Alternative Investments: A Conversation with GLASfunds CIO, Brett Hillard

Recently, I joined Michael Batnick and Ben Carlson on their popular Animal Spirits podcast to discuss the world of alternative investing, the challenges advisors face allocating to alternatives, and how GLASfunds eases traditional barriers for advisors and their clients with a unique approach to accessibility, customization, sourcing and reporting.

“We’re an RIA, we want to do some private investing. What sort of pain in the butt things do we have? What sort of hoops do we have to jump through to get our clients access to these funds?”

Michael’s question got straight to the heart of the GLASfunds mission, which is to make the process of alternative investing as seamless and friction-free as possible for advisors. 

I walked through the traditional pain points associated with alternative investing, including: 

• High minimums, some exceeding $20 million. When individuals are looking to build a diversified alternatives portfolio, that becomes very onerous very quickly. GLASfunds is able to aggregate positions to allow individual investors to essentially allocate to funds significantly under the traditional minimum investment requirement.

• Tedious subscription documents. For a larger institution making one subscription, it’s not a big deal. But when you’re trying to scale an alternatives program across dozens, if not hundreds of individuals, It’s very challenging for advisor firms just to consistently fill out 100, 200 page subscription documents. We’ve digitized the full process so it takes six to eight minutes to fully onboard a new client and submit the necessary information for AML KYC. And then the subscription is fully electronic, so we don’t have to send out paper docs to the end client or the advisor firm.

To listen to our full conversation, tune into the Animal Spirits podcast by clicking here.

And if you’d like to learn more about how GLASfunds alleviates historical complexities associated with alternative investing, get in touch with the team here.

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