Skip to navigationSkip to main contentSkip to right columnADVERTISEMENTAlexander DavisFri, July 17, 2026 at 11:02 PM GMT+2 4 min readDon Calcagni may be Mercer Advisors' chief investment officer, chairing the $115 billion RIA's committee that stewards its wealthy clients' money, but he also helps oversee Aspen Partners, the firm's two-year-old proprietary private markets fund-of-funds platform for its wealthiest clients.Aspen Partners represents a shift in the industry: that a sufficiently large registered investment adviser can act as its own general partner—sourcing, underwriting and managing institutional-grade private equity, venture and credit exposure in-house—rather than routing client capital through intermediary platforms like iCapital or CAIS. It's a bet a growing cohort of RIAs, Mercer among the largest, are increasingly willing to make, as scale economics let them hire the private markets talent, and command the service-provider relationships, once reserved for institutional allocators and multi-family offices.Denver-based Mercer's ultra-high-net-worth clients were already paying an advisory fee, and much of the private markets access available to them was ad hoc, expensive, and had inconsistent due diligence. Standing up an in-house GP entity run by Mercer employees with its own investment committee lets the firm negotiate directly with managers, strip out a layer of fees, and apply the same institutional rigor to sourcing and underwriting that pensions and endowments use, according to Calcagni.The following conversation was condensed and edited for clarity.DCalcagni_20240401.jpgDon CalcagniPitchBook: Why does it feel like RIA-run, proprietary fund-of-funds vehicles are becoming more common now, when they weren't a few years ago?Calcagni: Part of it is that you're now seeing truly institutional-caliber RIAs emerge. Mercer manages about $115 billion, which is bigger than most firms in the industry, and that scale lets us build relationships with providers like Deloitte and Paul Weiss for fund formation and hire dedicated, professionally trained private markets people. You didn't see that before because these firms were subscale. That's the void iCapital and CAIS filled for the smaller RIA and the broker-dealer channel.Second, you're seeing fintech platforms like Opto Investments (Mercer's technology partner) and Arch offer RIAs turnkey solutions where they can stand up their own fund-of-funds and just plug in.Why build your own vehicle rather than partnering with a platform like iCapital or CAIS?We observed that a lot of fund-of-funds structures get stuffed with mediocre GPs and layered with a 1-and-10 or 1-and-15 fee on top.Terms and Privacy PolicyEU DSA contactPrivacy & Cookie SettingsMore Info