Morgan Stanley has become the latest organization to put money into a platform connecting purveyors of alternative investments with end-clients, a field looking to become increasingly competitive.

iCapital Network, a fintech platform that says it is opening access to investments such as hedge funds and private equity to high net worth individuals and their advisors, has won more funding in its business with an investment from Morgan Stanley. This comes alongside investments made by UBS Financial Services and BlackRock.

To date, iCapital has secured total funding of more than $50 million, it said in a statement yesterday. 

The competitive race to run platforms for alternative assets that can be used by private clients is heating up. Other players in the field include Mercury Capital Advisors, a business formed by former Merrill Lynch executives and profiled recently by this news service here; Artivest and CAIS.

iCapital said it will use its new money to “further enhance its platform as both an operational solution for the wealth management community and as a conduit between high-net-worth investors and capital managers”.

Morgan Stanley Investment Management wants to use iCapital’s proprietary technology and services both to gain access advisors and their clients and streamline and automate aspects of its private fund operations. The move also suggests that large financial players, perhaps concerned they could be disintermediated by banks because of such platforms, are trying to stay in the game by making such partnerships, rather as big banks have sought to do so with fintech firms more generally.

“Many high-net-worth investors, in our view, are under-allocated to alternatives relative to their institutional counterparts,” Dan Simkowitz, head of Morgan Stanley Investment Management, said. “iCapital’s technology and investment platform successfully removes many of the operational impediments that high-net-worth investors face when seeking to increase their commitments to these strategies,” he added.

As of June 30, 2017, iCapital had surpassed more than $2.25 billion in private fund subscriptions for more than 3,500 investors across more than 45 funds and maintained an investor network of more than 1,800 registered entities overseeing more than $1.7 trillion in investable assets.