The mutual fund put investing in the hands of ordinary savers. The ETF made it cheaper, faster and borderless.
Both transformed asset management. Both also required infrastructure that didn’t exist when the product arrived.
Private markets are wave three. And the infrastructure problem is bigger this time.
Michael Gruener lived through both of the first two: mutual funds at Goldman, ETFs at BlackRock, where he ran distribution across Eastern Europe and the Middle East during the decade iShares settled the market.
Now, as co-CEO of Titanbay, he's building the infrastructure for wave three before it breaks.
Here’s the problem:
The trade rails underneath the wealth management industry were built for mutual funds and ETFs. Aggregated. Daily liquid. The individual investor’s identity disappears into the omnibus - and that’s by design, because it doesn’t matter.
Semi-liquid private markets require the opposite.
The regulator needs to know whether you’re a suitable investor. The GP needs to know when you bought, so it can tell you whether you can sell. Know your client. Know your trade. The existing infrastructure was built to aggregate both away.
The result: an 8% NIGO rate that works in advisory mode, where a few hundred trades get fixed by hand. It does not work when a discretionary model portfolio adds one semi-liquid fund and a rebalance triggers 100,000 trades in a single day.
That’s why the major platforms haven’t moved. Not because the product is wrong. Because the rails break at scale.
Here's what surprised me:
The fix is faster than you'd think. At least in Europe, where the wealth market is more concentrated than it looks. Roughly 75% of private wealth flows through 24 names. 20 universal banks, four platforms. That's it.
You don’t need to rebuild the whole system. You need to automate 24 institutions.
That’s what Titanbay is doing - connecting to distributors in whatever format their systems speak, applying private market logic and handing back a trade in good order.
"That trade infrastructure was not built for this product... It was built for the industry as it existed in 1996, when I started at Goldman. Nobody went back and rebuilt it."
Wave three is already in motion. This conversation is about what it breaks on the way through - and what gets built to replace it.
Looking ahead, we’ll be gathering in Toronto in October for The 2026 LP Tech Summit, a full day with the senior pension, operations and technology leaders building the infrastructure underneath institutional private markets allocation.
Tickets are $795 until August 10. $995 until September 5. $1,095 after.