-Mindaugas Suklevicius – Founder and Fund Manager at HF Quarters
Private markets are opening to a broader investor base, but the real changes are about product design as much as access. For years, alternatives were built mainly for institutional and professional capital, with private investor access remaining narrower and more selective. That picture is changing as alternative AUM is projected to reach around USD 34 trillion by 2030, according to PwC. Private markets, digital assets and other alternatives are also opening up to retail investors. That makes this more than a fundraising story. It is a structural shift in who private market products may need to serve.
ESMA’s March 2026 data suggests the private wealth opportunity is advancing in two phases. Retail investors still accounted for only a little over EUR 700 billion of the nearly EUR 8 trillion held in alternative investment funds in 2024. Yet the ELTIF market is expanding quickly. ESMA’s register includes 246 ELTIFs, around 62% of them launched in 2024 or 2025, and 60% either dedicated to retail investors or open to both retail and professional investors.
In Europe, Luxembourg continues to play a central role in the industry. As of July 2025, the ESMA Register listed 211 ELTIFs in the EU, with 124 domiciled in Luxembourg, nearly 60% of the total. That concentration says something important about where managers are choosing to build when they want a structure that can support cross-border distribution. ELTIFs benefit from an EU marketing passport for both retail and professional investors, and ELTIF 2.0 made that structure easier to use in practice.
Reaching a broader investor base depends on decisions made during structuring. Managers need to decide at launch whether broader private wealth channels are strategically relevant, because liquidity terms, ticket sizes, servicing capacity, reporting design and distribution economics all need to align with the investor profile they intend to serve. Retrofitting a fund later for broader private wealth access is possible, but usually more complex and less efficient than building for that route from the outset.