Morgan Stanley’s wealth administration arm is giving its purchasers an opportunity to purchase and promote coveted shares of personal firms earlier than they’re accessible to the broader public, as startups weighing preliminary public choices more and more stay non-public for longer.

The financial institution’s Personal Markets Transaction Desk will help Morgan Stanley Wealth Administration purchasers looking for to put money into the extremely fragmented and opaque marketplace for non-public shares, in accordance with an announcement Monday. Shares in additional than 1,000 so-called unicorns — non-public firms valued at over $1 billion — aren’t accessible to most of the people, the assertion confirmed.

Personal market trades let staff and a few institutional buyers promote their stakes to accredited buyers. Although the shares are inherently riskier because of their relative illiquidity, buyers have been drawn to them as a technique to seize the expansion of firms like Reddit Inc., which is about to go public this month after almost 20 years as a personal agency.

“There’s been growing strain over the previous variety of years to get into these firms whereas the worth creation is going on relatively than having to attend till the IPO,” stated Kevin Swan, Head of Personal Markets Options at Morgan Stanley Wealth Administration. “When buyers have a necessity for liquidity we need to be there to have an answer for them.”

The providing received’t be geared toward competing with platforms that already allow buyers to purchase and promote shares of nonetheless non-public firms like Forge International Holdings Inc. and Rainmaker Securities. As an alternative, Morgan Stanley will take an “open and agnostic strategy,” working with exterior platforms in addition to its totally different inside arms to finish trades based mostly on every scenario, Swan stated in a telephone interview.