Brokerage Stickiness from Private Markets
Ben Haber, CEO of Monark, on building the DTCC for the private markets
This is really a distribution economics claim, not just a product claim. Monark becomes hard to remove when private market deals make meaningfully more money for a brokerage than stocks or ETFs, because the brokerage then has a reason to give private assets better placement in the app, dedicate product and compliance teams to the rollout, and keep expanding the offering from single name pre-IPO deals into evergreen funds and other alternatives.
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The money flow is concrete. An investor puts in $100,000, about 5% can be taken upfront, admin costs come out, and the remaining fee pool is often split with the brokerage, commonly 50 50. That can leave the platform with 2% to 3% of gross dollars raised, far above the cents per order economics of commission free public trading.
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That margin matters because Monark is embedded inside the brokerage workflow. It plugs into the existing app, lets users invest from cash already sitting in their brokerage account, handles suitability, money movement, reporting, and in some cases gets positions shown on the regular brokerage statement. Once that setup is live, ripping it out would mean giving up both revenue and product surface area.
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The broader market is moving the same way. Monark describes pre-IPO as the wedge, then evergreen funds as the next layer, especially for RIAs that need diversified alt sleeves. Large incumbents are validating the category through moves like Schwab buying Forge and Morgan Stanley buying EquityZen, which makes private markets look less like a side feature and more like a core brokerage revenue line.
The next step is that brokerages will treat private markets like a permanent menu item, not a promotional experiment. As more platforms add pre-IPO deals, evergreen funds, and eventually secondary liquidity, the winning infrastructure provider will be the one that turns alternative assets into a repeatable, high margin workflow that sits alongside public markets inside the same account.