Dean Rubino on why private fund onboarding stayed manual

A typical five-fund subscription in private markets has meant roughly 1,000 pages and 15 signatures. KPC Private Funds, an SEC-registered investment adviser that gives independent financial advisers access to hedge funds, private equity, co-investments and pre-IPO opportunities, has launched PRISM 2.0, which lets an adviser onboard a client into up to five investments through a single process, cutting that to about 250 pages and five signatures.

Dean Rubino is the company's chief executive. In written answers to Disrupts, he explained why onboarding for alternatives stayed manual for so long, what had to be standardised to change it, how much of the adoption gap is friction rather than appetite, and what the industry still has to fix.

The first reason it stayed manual, Rubino said, is that nobody needed it to change. Private investments were made either directly by large institutions with dedicated operations teams or through pooled, one-size-fits-all fund-of-funds. "These institutions were well resourced operationally, relatively inactive from an investment standpoint, perhaps adding only a handful of new funds each year, and consistently completed documents on behalf of the same entity. Neither model created much pressure to rethink onboarding." The second reason, he added, is that "it is a difficult problem to solve".

What changed was the growth in demand from independent advisers, as new platforms made institutional-quality investments available at lower minimums and customised multi-investment portfolios became practical. "But the industry solved access before it solved infrastructure."

The traditional models, he said, "were never designed for an adviser investing across 10, 50, or 100 client accounts". Advisers invest continuously, through portfolio reviews, rebalancing, liquidity events, new clients and capital deployment. Subscription documents compound the problem because they are written to accommodate every possible investor type at once. "An institution completes those documents essentially the same way each time. An adviser may complete them for an individual one day, a trust the next, a family foundation after that, and a married couple the next. The requirements are constantly changing."

"Private markets did not become difficult because of the investments; they became difficult because the infrastructure never evolved to support the way advisers invest today."

Rethinking the workflow

Making a single five-in-one process possible, Rubino said, meant "rethinking the entire workflow from the ground up". That covered redesigning subscription documents, reimagining fund structures, standardising anti-money-laundering and know-your-customer checks, eliminating duplicate data collection and making sure tax reporting, statements and performance reporting still work after the investment is made, all inside a regulated environment with compliance in view at every stage. "It is really an end-to-end redesign of the investment experience rather than simply digitising existing paperwork."

On how much of the adoption gap is friction, he said it is larger than most people assume, or want to admit. Industry surveys he has seen suggest roughly 40 to 60 per cent of advisers cite administrative complexity as a hindrance to adopting private investments. But he frames it differently. "There is the initial decision to invest, where administrative friction absolutely discourages some advisers. But then there is what happens after they have already invested. We often see advisers who want to increase a client's allocation but hesitate because they do not want to ask that client to go through another daunting administrative process." Friction, in other words, affects ongoing allocation decisions as well as the first one.

Review, not data entry

Unifying onboarding, Rubino insisted, does not remove investor protections. "We are not eliminating investor protections; we are eliminating inefficiency." Clients still review and electronically sign subscription documents, but far fewer of them. They still provide AML and KYC information, but with less repetition. Advisers still perform suitability reviews, and funds still run their own review and approval, in a way that no longer involves the adviser or the client.

What has changed is what people are asked to do by hand. "Traditional workflows use people to repeatedly enter data, which creates opportunities for error. PRISM uses people to review and validate data, which helps identify and eliminate errors before an investment is submitted." He put it as a rule: "Manual entry creates errors; manual review catches them." Technology, he added, is the tool that enables the change rather than the change itself; much of the work was in rethinking fund structures, service-provider workflows and how information is collected, validated and delivered.

Access solved, implementation next

Rubino sees the opening of private markets to advisers in two phases. The first, access, has made enormous progress, with a far broader universe available at lower minimums, though more choice does not by itself make it easier to identify the right investments or construct a portfolio. The second is implementation and infrastructure: how advisers implement multiple private investments across a client base, monitor exposures and liquidity, and report on them alongside the rest of a portfolio.

That is where PRISM 2.0 sits. After the investment, KPC consolidates administration and reporting, including a single K-1 tax form for taxable investors, and gives advisers tools to monitor private-market holdings at both client and book level. The biggest remaining opportunity, he said, is integration across the ecosystem. "Custodians, portfolio management systems and reporting platforms are still adapting infrastructure originally designed for traditional securities to accommodate private investments." Connecting those systems, and making private investments "function more like a native part of an adviser's overall practice", is where the industry still has significant work to do.

KPC keeps a list of adviser pain points that Rubino said now exceeds 50 items and keeps growing. "Our raison d'être is to solve them, one by one." But he was clear that infrastructure is not the point on its own. "We can solve every operational pain point in the world and still fail if the investments themselves are not unique, compelling, understandable and appropriate quality. The technology and infrastructure only matter if they provide access to investments worth owning."

KPC is also widening its definition of private markets beyond hedge fund and private equity structures to pre-IPO equity and co-investment opportunities, accessed through the same infrastructure. PRISM 2.0 launched on 29 July 2026.