Private Markets Go Retail Only If the Infrastructure Does

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Private markets are starting to show up in more places - new platforms, new products, new language about “opening access”. It’s easy to frame this as a distribution problem: put the deals online, simplify the UI, and retail participation follows.

But private markets don’t scale like that. They were built for a small number of institutions writing large cheques, not thousands of individuals investing across borders. So the constraint isn’t demand. It’s infrastructure. Retail access only works when the legal structures, compliance processes, custody, reporting, and investor protections are robust enough to carry it.

Private markets were designed for relationships.

If you’re a pension fund investing €50 million at a time, a lot can be handled manually. Lawyers negotiate bespoke terms. Reporting arrives when it arrives. Ownership is tracked through a handful of entities. If something needs fixing, people get on a call and fix it.

Retail is the opposite. It’s thousands of smaller allocations, repeated across jurisdictions, with a much lower tolerance for ambiguity. The moment you broaden participation, the “plumbing” starts to matter more than the pitch.

When we talk about infrastructure in this context, we don’t mean servers or slick interfaces. We mean the systems that make an investment work at scale: consistent onboarding and eligibility checks, clear legal ownership and record-keeping, robust custody and client-money handling, repeatable reporting standards, and mechanisms that protect investors when things don’t go to plan.

Without those rails, “access” becomes a promise the market can’t keep. Not because investors aren’t interested - but because the operational reality collapses under volume.

That’s why the next phase of private-market expansion won’t be won by whoever has the best marketing. It will be won by whoever can make private investing straight-forward, repeatable, and regulator-proof.

What has to be true for retail private investing to work

Once you move beyond a handful of institutional investors, the questions change. It’s no longer “can we make this deal available?” It’s “can we run these deals properly, at scale, for years?”

That comes down to a set of rails - unglamorous, but decisive.

1. Identity and eligibility rails
   Private investments come with constraints: who can invest, from where, under what rules, and with what checks. Know-your-customer and anti-money-laundering requirements don’t get simpler as you add more investors - they get stricter. If the process isn’t consistent and auditable, you don’t have scale. You have operational risk.

2. Legal structure rails
   Retail participation only works if ownership can be represented cleanly. Private companies don’t want - and often can’t handle - thousands of names on their cap table. So you need structures that consolidate investors into a single line item while still preserving clear beneficial ownership, information rights, and governance mechanics. Without that, “access” creates friction for everyone: investors, issuers, and regulators.

3. Custody and money-movement rails
   In public markets, custody is mostly invisible - which is the point. Assets are safeguarded, client money is segregated, and reconciliations happen as a matter of routine. In private markets, those same principles need to exist, but the operational pathways are less standardised. If cash handling, confirmations, and record-keeping aren’t tight, errors compound quietly.

4. Reporting and disclosure rails
   Private companies don’t report like public companies. That’s not a moral failing - it’s simply how the market developed. But if retail investors are going to participate responsibly, there needs to be a baseline: what updates are provided, how often, and what risks are disclosed clearly upfront. Better infrastructure doesn’t create certainty. It creates clarity.

5. Valuation rails
   In public markets, you can point to a price every second. In private markets, valuations are usually periodic and negotiated, often anchored to funding rounds. That doesn’t make them meaningless - but it does mean they’re not the same thing as a live market price. Retail access requires disciplined processes around how valuations are communicated, what they represent, and what they don’t.

6. Liquidity rails
   Most private investments are illiquid by design. That should be stated plainly. If secondary markets grow, transfers still need rules: approvals, documentation, price discovery, and equal treatment across investors. Liquidity isn’t just a feature you “add”. It’s a system you govern.

Put simply: if these rails aren’t in place, retail participation doesn’t fail dramatically. It fails slowly - through delays, disputes, inconsistent disclosures, and messy outcomes that undermine trust in the entire category.

Why 2026 shifts from “apps” to “pipes”

For the last decade, consumer finance rewarded distribution. Build a clean interface, reduce friction, and you could win attention quickly. In many categories, that worked - because the underlying market was already standardised. The rails existed. The app was the differentiator.

Private markets are different. The rails are the differentiator.

That’s why “infrastructure” is likely to be the real theme of 2026. Not because retail suddenly floods into private investing, but because the industry is being forced to professionalise the mechanics. As more participants enter - and as regulators pay closer attention - the market starts to value repeatability over novelty.

The pattern is familiar. Early phases are noisy: lots of products, lots of claims about access, plenty of experimentation. Then the centre of gravity shifts. The winners become the players who can run the process reliably: across jurisdictions, across thousands of investors, and across long time horizons.

In practice, that looks like slower progress than most headlines suggest. But it’s also the kind that lasts. When the infrastructure improves, you don’t notice it immediately. You notice it later, when fewer things break - and when trust compounds quietly.

In 2026, the most important work in private markets won’t look like disruption. It will look like standards.

What this means for retail investors

If private markets continue moving toward broader participation, the most useful question won’t be “can I access this deal?” It will be “what sits underneath the access?”

Because in private investing, the wrapper matters. The same underlying company can feel very different depending on how the investment is structured, what rights you actually have, what information you receive, and how cleanly ownership is recorded. Those aren’t details. They’re the difference between a legible long-term position and an opaque one.

A few practical implications follow:

• Operational quality is part of risk. People tend to think of risk as “will the company succeed?” But there’s also process risk: unclear documentation, messy ownership records, inconsistent disclosures, and fragile handling of client money. Good infrastructure doesn’t remove investment risk. It reduces avoidable risk.

• Private valuations require more discipline to interpret. A private valuation is usually a negotiated reference point, updated intermittently. It can be informative, but it’s not a live market signal. The more retail participates, the more important it becomes that valuations are communicated with context - not implied certainty.

• Liquidity should be assumed to be limited. If a product hints at “easy exits” without explaining the mechanics, it’s a warning sign. Transfers in private markets can involve approvals, documentation, and uneven price discovery. Any emerging secondary market only works if the governance is strong.

The broader point is simple: retail access can be a meaningful evolution, but it only works when it’s built in a way that respects the realities of private investing. The infrastructure is what turns access into participation.

This is where Shuttle’s focus sits.

We’re not trying to “bring private markets online” in the superficial sense. We’re rebuilding the infrastructure that makes private investing workable at retail scale - the parts most people don’t see, but every serious market depends on.

That means designing structures that keep cap tables clean while preserving clear beneficial ownership and investor rights. It means building compliance and eligibility checks that are repeatable, auditable, and consistent across jurisdictions. It means treating custody, client-money safeguards, and record-keeping as core product - not back-office details.

None of that removes the fundamental risks of private investing. Private assets can still be illiquid. Outcomes can still be uncertain. Companies can still fail.

But infrastructure determines whether those risks are properly understood and fairly administered - or whether investors discover too late that “access” was just a thin layer over fragile processes.

If private markets are going to open to a broader base of investors, it won’t be led by the best front-end. It will be led by whoever rebuilds the rails. Shuttle is choosing to do that work first.

In Summary

Private markets aren’t becoming more accessible because people suddenly discovered them. They’re becoming accessible because the industry is being forced to mature.

The question isn’t whether retail investors want in. It’s whether the market can handle them responsibly - with clear structures, clean records, disciplined disclosure, and processes that hold up when something goes wrong.

In 2026, the most important progress won’t look like a breakthrough. It will look like infrastructure quietly doing its job.

What we’ve been working on at Shuttle

• Onboarding initial customers of Shuttle Deploy (NEW) 🏗️ 

• Finalising details ahead of Drop No.4 (part deaux) ✌️ 

• Exploring some exciting event ideas for 2026 🚀 

The Unsophisticated Investor is brought to you by Scott & Rob, the founders of Shuttle. We’re both sick of private markets being a playground exclusive to the ultra-wealthy so we started a company to challenge the status-quo. Shuttle’s singular focus is to unlock private markets for Millennial and Gen Z tech professionals and help them build wealth through the highest performing private market opportunities.

Scott & Rob
Shuttle Co-Founders