“Three years ago, private markets managers wouldn’t have come knocking”
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This article was first published by PostTrade 360.
To many observers, 2026 already looks like the year private markets tip into true super‑scale – and distribution becomes the essential cog holding that growth together. Fresh off announcements that both Blackstone and Hamilton Lane will distribute their funds through Clearstream’s platform, the head of its fund services unit, Philippe Seyll, explains what this means for Clearstream’s network of more than 300 distribution partners and their investors. He also unpacks why private‑market heavyweights are turning to industrial‑scale infrastructure just as Europe sets its sights on industrial‑sized growth – and why technology, not product design, will determine who can actually deliver it.
Private markets have hit an inflection point. Barclays’ latest survey shows that 79% of private investors expect to increase their allocations to private markets in the coming years. What does Blackstone’s move onto Clearstream’s infrastructure tell us about where this surge in demand is heading?
Three years ago, this announcement wouldn’t have happened. Back then, firms like Blackstone were focused almost exclusively on large institutional investors. They could spend a week chasing a €100–200 million ticket, and the economics made sense.
But once private‑market products started attracting mass‑affluent and smaller‑ticket investors, the model had to change. You can’t spend a week to secure a €1 million subscription. It becomes uneconomical.
So these managers looked around and said: If our products are becoming more wholesale, how do we scale without building the entire distribution infrastructure ourselves? They saw that platforms like ours already connect to hundreds of distributors globally. That’s when the conversations started. They realised we occupy a part of the value chain they would struggle to build: the B2B2C connection to the end‑investor.
Blackstone joining our platform is a signal that private markets are moving from boutique distribution to industrial scale.
Which parts of the chain are most incompatible with the scale private markets are now aiming for?
The pain points are everywhere — on both sides of the value chain.
Private‑market funds don’t want to connect to thousands of small investors. Distributors don’t want to manage hundreds of bilateral connections to individual General Partners (GPs). Historically, the whole process relied on PDFs, faxes, excel files, bespoke workflows, and manual reconciliation. That’s fine for a handful of institutional clients. It collapses under volume.
What we’ve built is technology that reduces the complexity. If 50 investors each want to commit €2 million, we make it appear to the GP as if one large investor — say a large global wealth manager — is committing €100 million. No feeders, no parallel structures. Just technology.
We maintain the underlying register, we split communications, we handle the operational burden. We invested once for the multitude.
How does Clearstream’s infrastructure change the operational reality for managers and distributors?
Seyll: We’ve spent 20 years building a seamless, scalable platform. On the distributor side, they have one cash account and one securities account with us, and from there they can access over 260,000 funds. Instead of connecting to hundreds of asset managers, they connect to us once.
On the GP side, we guarantee that if a subscription arrives on time, the trade will be executed and the cash will arrive. Reconciliation becomes minimal because everything sits on our platform.
And crucially, if transaction volumes grow, neither side needs to grow their staff. We process enormous volumes already. We’re a technology play — scalable by design.
We’re now taking the same infrastructure that has worked for plain‑vanilla UCITS for two decades and applying it to private markets. That’s the game‑changer.
Evergreen structures are gaining traction. Where do you see the strongest demand emerging, and how are you adapting the model?
Evergreen is definitely where the strongest demand is coming from for the mass‑affluent segment. These structures behave much more like UCITS, and our platform is already optimised for that model.
But evergreen won’t replace everything. Some investors will always prefer full‑fledged private‑equity funds with commitments, capital calls, and long life cycles. They don’t want to pay for the liquidity buffer that evergreen structures require.
So we need to support both worlds: evergreen and traditional closed‑end funds. And we do.
More broadly, we believe private markets will play a central role in Europe’s Savings and Investment Union. Rebuilding Europe’s industrial backbone requires long‑term capital, and private markets are part of that story. Our job is to make access possible for smaller investors in a safe, efficient way.
Is this partnership a blueprint for onboarding other private‑market managers? What comes next?
Yes, absolutely. We’re seeing a big wave of interest. Distributors want access to private‑market funds. GPs want access to the mass‑affluent segment. And we sit in the middle.
It’s a win‑win‑win: investors get access to products they couldn’t reach before; distributors can offer those products without building new infrastructure; and GPs can scale beyond the institutional market without reinventing their operating model.
Take Hamilton Lane, for example. Distributors on our network — and the investors they serve — can now access Hamilton Lane’s Private Markets Access ELTIF Fund, a multi‑manager strategy spanning asset classes, regions, GPs, and vintage years through a single allocation. It forms part of Hamilton Lane’s USD 15bn global evergreen platform and is fully aligned with the 2024 ELTIF 2.0 framework.
There are more of these partnerships in the pipeline. This is a long‑term trend.
Of course, private markets come with constraints — liquidity and valuation being the main ones. Evergreen structures mitigate some of that, but investors still need to understand what they’re buying. We don’t advise on funds as it is the responsibility of private markets managers to educate private investors, but we hope the market approaches this responsibly.
Overall, though, the direction is clear and the infrastructure is ready.
