Retail private-market access won't fix the trust deficit

Only 14 percent of American adults trust traditional financial institutions completely to manage their money and give good advice, and that figure, more than the headline numbers about withheld private deals, should govern an advisor’s next portfolio conversation. Two-thirds of the more than 2,000 adults in the September 15 DealMaker survey fielded by Propeller Insights believe the country’s highest-growth private investments are being kept deliberately out of reach, while 51 percent say the stock market is no longer the best place to build wealth in America.

DealMaker runs an investment technology platform that lets retail investors put money directly into private companies, so the sponsor sells the remedy the research appears to demand. The alignment makes them a mood reading taken by a party with a stake in the answer, and DealMaker co-founder and CEO Rebecca Kacaba read the results as something sturdier, describing a public that has noticed access to the best opportunities has quietly become a two-tiered system.

Per SEC data cited in the coverage, the number of U.S.-listed domestic public companies fell by more than half between 1996 and 2025 while private companies took a significant and growing share of capital formation, and legislators and regulators are moving to change who is permitted into private capital markets at all, though the coverage does not say what form those changes would take. When the public pipeline thins while private valuations climb, the belief that the good seats are reserved stops looking like resentment and starts looking like arithmetic.

The wealth industry’s reflex will be to read that headline number as a demand curve and widen the menu, but look first at who answered: a national sample of adults is neither an RIA’s client base nor the population a custodian’s private-markets desk is built to reach. The coverage ties the findings to advisors working with non-accredited clients, and for that group the gap between appetite and access is a live operating problem because the fundamental case for alternatives is established while the regulatory and access barriers remain unresolved for most retail clients. Appetite among the general public, though, has never been what binds a wealth platform’s shelf.

The grievance readings run hottest — 66 percent on withheld private opportunities, 60 percent saying the cards feel stacked when they build a portfolio — while the reading that would signal an actual change in allocation, the 51 percent who have written off public equities as the best path to wealth, is the coolest of the three. That ordering suggests the public is lodging a complaint about fairness rather than placing an order for private risk, and advisors who have watched clients talk a bolder game than they invest will recognize the pattern.

Sit with the trust number. That figure points somewhere other than private markets: at the institutions that would be asked to deliver any newly widened access, and that would collect the fee for doing it. A survey about demand for private deals has largely measured a deficit of trust in the people who sell them.

The private-markets build-out in the wealth channel has always looked like a distribution business more than an allocation one, with blank offering lines the tell, wealth-channel capital pre-sold before the Form D, and public managers paying a steep toll to rent the private-markets label. The DealMaker results neither contradict that nor confirm it, because they measure yearning rather than flows. The households with a custodian, a workplace plan and an advisor are the ones those rails are being laid to reach, and a national sample of adults is a different population; a gateway built for sentiment serves a different customer than one built for a client.

The same pattern is already visible at the retirement-plan doorway, where the regulatory safe harbors that open alternative strategies to plans convert an access question into a liability transfer: the plan, and eventually the participant, carries terms that used to be negotiated between institutions. Widen the entrance and the burden travels with the client.

Firms that treat this survey as a mandate to broaden private-market menus for less-affluent clients are reading the headline and missing the business. In the next cycle the scarce asset is trust, and access is being commoditized in front of us, as every large custodian, platform and asset manager races to build out the same private-markets rail. Answering a fairness complaint with more product answers the wrong question, and the industry is likely to spend several years learning that the clients it keeps are the ones it convinced, not the ones it allocated to.

The Form Ds and blank offering lines that follow the accredited-investor debate will settle this faster than any attitude poll. If those lines fill with households that already had advisors, the access grievance was never the wealth channel’s to answer, and 14 percent is still the number it has to.