Johnathan Rickman | Blue Vault
At Alts Summit 2025 earlier this month, 450+ people flocked to Frisco, Texas, for real-time alts learning and professional networking. We covered a lot of ground in three days, but there were a few topics that stood out based on what we heard during and after the event:
• Technology, and the rise of AI, increasingly influence investment choices.
• Alts education for advisors is critical for creating and managing client portfolios.
• Real estate remains an enduring and attractive strategy when it’s managed well.
We plan to explore these topics in depth in the days and weeks to come, mining important insights from the Summit and inviting our partners and other industry experts to share their relevant knowledge with you. But first, let’s recap some of the presentations and breakouts that first brought these issues to the fore.
Wealthtech and AI
Financial services technology, or “wealthtech” for advisors, consists of innovative digital solutions that streamline subscriptions, electronic signature, and other processes. But with artificial intelligence suddenly in the picture and seemingly here to stay, new compliance questions have emerged that threaten to complicate matters all over again.
Several speakers at the Summit addressed this technology conundrum, with at least one expert admitting that their firm is “building the plane as we fly it” relative to AI use. Representatives from service providers Helix and TIFIN AMP, offered advice that sought to ground advisors on this issue, recommending firms that use AI on their platforms or in their communications with clients develop a transparent AI policy that governs how they use it.
The speakers — Steve Synder, Chief Operating Officer at Helix; Samantha Davison, Chief Marketing Officer at TIFIN AMP; and Jeff Mehi, Head of Wealth Partnerships at TIFIN AMP — cautioned that such a policy should neither be too loose nor too strict and should reflect results from extensive testing of your AI system.
April is Wealthtech Month at Blue Vault, and we hope to shed further light on this issue and provide tips for creating a firm-wide policy on AI in the coming weeks.
Alts Education for Advisors
Many advisors at the Summit were completely new to the world of alternative investments and were in search of basic information they could pass on to investors. Some even noted that their clients were the ones pushing them into the alts space, not the other way around.
A panel moderated by Cherie Fournier of Marketing Intent, which focused on empowering women investors with alternative investments, had some good advice on how advisors can share their understanding of alts and what they learned at the Summit with clients:
• Employ simple storytelling, not statistics, to explain how alts work.
• Keep it simple and try to use graphics in any materials you develop.
• Talk about alternative investments generally, not about specific products.
These ideas and other discussions at the Summit have inspired us to “get back to basics” during the upcoming month of May: What are alternative investments? How do they work? Which alts do we, Blue Vault, cover in our research, insights, and webinars?
Real Estate: Ever Relevant
Real estate may not seem like an appealing solution to many investors at the moment, but many advisors at the Summit continued to champion the asset class as a crucial component of responsible portfolio construction.
As with any investment, understanding an asset manager’s track record and commitment to transparency can allay some of those concerns, and multiple Summit presenters emphasized that point in speaking to real estate’s timeless appeal and current capabilities.
We received updates on, and gained fresh insights into, how:
• Real estate solutions can attract high-net-worth clients
• Qualified Opportunity Zone fund strategies work and have performed
• Tax-advantaged real estate strategies can provide financial planning solutions
• Private credit backed by real estate offers investors a range of return opportunities
Private credit and real estate investment topics will be our focus during the upcoming months of June and July, respectively, so subscribe to our emails if you haven’t already.
Nontraded REITs were the original focus of Blue Vault’s beginnings in 2009, but the universe of alternative investments has expanded exponentially since then, and our focus has followed suit.
Check out the range of topics discussed at Alts Summit 2025 and bookmark the insights page on our website to stay on the cusp of everything alts!
