Monark Standardizes SPVs for Trading
Ben Haber, CEO of Monark, on why 2026 is the year of alts
The strategic point is that SPVs turn a messy stock transfer into a standardized fund purchase. When an investor buys directly into a private company cap table, the company often has consent rights, rights of first refusal, and transfer restrictions that can slow or stop the deal. With an SPV, the company deals with one vehicle, while end investors buy interests in that vehicle, which is easier to administer, settle, and support inside a brokerage workflow.
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Direct cap table trades are operationally heavy. Private share transfers often require issuer approval, transfer paperwork, and checks on contractual restrictions, which is why platforms built around direct secondary matching still need humans to shepherd deals through closing.
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Monark is building around that bottleneck by standardizing the SPV itself. Its model covers investor suitability, money movement, reporting, and secondary trading of SPV interests, and it is pairing with SPV administration infrastructure to make formation and back office work faster and cheaper.
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This also explains the product difference versus marketplaces like Hiive and Forge. Those platforms are closer to buyer seller matching for private stock, while Monark is trying to make the wrapper tradeable, so it can settle interests inside its own ecosystem faster and with fewer company level touchpoints.
The market is heading toward more private asset access through brokerage accounts, but the winning systems will hide company level friction behind standardized vehicles. If SPV rules keep loosening and more custody, administration, and trading move into one stack, private secondaries start to look less like bespoke private negotiations and more like repeatable market infrastructure.