New Industry Data Standard Aims to Remove an Operational Barrier to Retail Access to Private Markets
Washington, DC; March 18, 2025— The Investment Company Institute (ICI) today released a proposed industry data standard designed to address the lack of communication standards and governance that support subscription processing and client onboarding for alternative investment products. This data standard will help overcome a critical operational barrier to expanding retail investor access to private markets.
Today’s retail alternative investment processes are often customized and fragmented, limiting scalability, increasing operational risk, and creating inefficiencies across asset managers, intermediaries, and service providers, with subscription processing still largely manual.
The paper, Subscription Data Framework for Retail Alternative Investments, establishes common data elements, definitions, and structures for subscription documentation, beginning with products such as business development companies (BDCs), tender offer funds, and real estate investment trusts (REITs). By standardizing how core investor and account data are defined and structured, while remaining platform agnostic, the paper is intended to support interoperability across recordkeeping, trading, and distribution systems.
“Robust data standardization is foundational to achieving scalable operations for retail alternative investments. Interoperable systems are essential to delivering improved service quality, faster processing, and lower costs for investors, while enabling firms to better manage operational risk and support broader distribution,” said ICI Chief of Industry Operations Jeff Naylor.
The ICI Retail Alternatives Working Group, comprising firms across asset management, distribution, and servicing, developed the paper. This paper builds on ICI's more than 40-year history leading industry operational standardization, including its role as the sponsoring entity behind the creation of NSCC Fund/SERV—the shared infrastructure that made mutual fund distribution at scale possible.
ICI is inviting manufacturers, distributors, and service providers involved in retail alternative investments to review the framework, evaluate potential applications within their operating environments, and engage with the Working Group as it considers next steps to promote broader adoption and interoperability across the industry. The framework is designed to evolve over time. Its straightforward, flexible format supports collaboration and consistency across diverse systems and technologies to encourage widespread adoption.
Read the full paper here.