Alts Pulse Ep. 18: Taking the pulse of private markets with iCapital Chairman & CEO Lawrence Calcano

Welcome back to the Alt Pulse. I'm Michael Sizemore, cofounder and partner of Broadhaven Ventures and founder of the Altcos Mainstream Podcast. I'm here with Lawrence Calcano, chairman and CEO of iCapital. We got a lot to discuss today. You were in Asia recently. What was that like? There's so much activity going on in Asia, really everywhere outside The US, candidly, but it's incredible. There's just a real excitement around giving alternative products to advisors to help seed their clients and it's just taken off the interest in learning about and allocating to alts. Where do you think a region like Asia is relative to The US as an example, which has more AUM when you think about AUM in private markets, more in The US than in Europe than in Asia. So how do you think about where Asia is on its adoption of Alt's journey? I think it's still early. But by the way, I think The US is still early as well. Right? You still have a dynamic where, you know, a small number, 25, 30% of the advisers are doing 70% of the business. And so while that's changing and the sort of growth in product design and so forth is helping to facilitate more advisers coming to the asset class, US is still in the early days. And that's true about Asia. It's true about Europe. It's true about Canada, Latin America as well. But we're seeing it really pick up. For iCapital, Asia is our largest market outside The US. I think we're up to about $18,000,000,000 in Asia broadly, whereas Europe is about 12. Canada is a little over 7, and Latin America is about 5,000,000,000. How would you characterize the wealth management market structure there and characterize in the context of how firms are thinking about adopting private markets. What are the similarities and differences between Asia, Europe, and The US? When we started iCapital, our focus was on the independent wealth market, the RIAs, who were growing their businesses but didn't have access to alternatives. And then we broadly understood the fact that really all the advisory distribution platforms in the industry really needed technology. They didn't all need access obviously, but they certainly needed technology to create scale and so forth. Outside The US, though, it's quite different. So in Asia, our entry, if you will, is much more private bank focused. Our business has always been about serving advisers. However they choose to practice, that's up to them, whether they wanna be, you know, entrepreneurs or employees. Both models have produced excellent results for clients and for the advisors themselves. We tend not to take a position on that and take a position on how can we best serve advisors in their various work arrangements. How does the way in which advisors in Asia allocate to all to manifest itself if it's mainly private bank driven? I don't think it's that different. Like in The US, they're interested …