Alternative Allocations with Tony Davidow · Nov 3, 2026 · 30m · 23m saved
With Rafay Farooqui, Chairman, Founder and CEO of Subscribe
Photo via Subscribe
Rafay Farooqui, Chairman, Founder and CEO of Subscribe, told Tony Davidow on Alternative Allocations that private markets still run on paper, email and manual paperwork, and that this is what holds back their growth. Most software vendors in the business fix one step of a private-market investment at a time. Rafay built Subscribe to run the whole process in one place.
"Data is slow, reporting is slow, documents are manual, availability of product is either on email, PDF or some marketplaces. So you actually don't have the two things that you actually need to start with to probably solve this, which is centralization and the second is standardization." — Rafay Farooqui
Rafay co-founded CAIS in 2009, after starting his career at Goldman Sachs in 1998 covering hedge funds. He founded Subscribe in 2015, and it now serves about 1,200 wealth management firms and 55,000 advisers.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 30 minutes of audio, 7 minutes of reading.
Here are the 6 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
Private markets lack two basics: one central place to work, and standard data
Every investor signs a subscription document, which made it Subscribe's way into every side of the market
A wirehouse or private bank runs 17 steps on one subscription document, and Subscribe built for that case first
Reporting vendors that charge per position raise costs as assets grow
Top-decile venture funds are almost closed to wealth clients, because endowments fill them first
Rafay expects private assets to be priced, tokenized and traded at scale within five to ten years
1. Subscribe Replaces Paperwork
Subscribe's aim is a single operating system for running a private-markets program, open to wealth managers, institutions, fund managers, fund administrators and law firms. Rafay explained the idea to Tony Davidow, Senior Private Market Strategist at Franklin Templeton.
Rafay Farooqui founded Subscribe in 2015 to give private markets their first modern operating system
"Subscribe was founded in 2015, so we're coming up on our 11th year in the industry. And the premise behind it was to deliver to the industry as a whole the first modern operating system for managing a private markets program." — Rafay Farooqui
Heads of alternatives at wealth firms spend their time on operations instead of on choosing investments. Rafay said the order of work matters: a firm has to gather the problem in one place before it can make the process uniform.
"If you're not starting with centralization and standardization, you're working probably backwards on trying to solve the problem. You got to get the problem in one place and then smooth it out." — Rafay Farooqui
