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Ignites: New Interval Funds Face Murky Path to Fidelity, Schwab Platforms

December 17, 2025

Alyson Velati reports on the growing challenges interval fund sponsors face when trying to gain access to major custodial platforms such as Charles Schwab and Fidelity, as onboarding timelines and asset requirements remain unclear and inconsistent.

Kimberly Flynn, President of XA Investments, states that interval funds generally expect to wait six to 12 months to be onboarded, but noted that the process has increasingly stretched longer. “The onboarding process for new interval funds is often more — sometimes much more — lengthy,” she said. Based on XA Investments’ client experience, Schwab and Fidelity “require that there is demonstrated interest and demand on their platform before they will onboard a new interval fund,” Flynn explained, adding that timelines can vary depending on a firm’s existing relationship with the custodians. “We have had multiple clients that were delayed onboarding until their one-year anniversary,” she wrote in an email.

Kevin Davis, Managing Director, Head of Sales and Distribution at XA Investments, pointed to capacity constraints at the custodial platforms as a key factor. Schwab and Fidelity “don’t have the manpower to onboard all of these products,” he said. “I think they’re playing traffic cop.”

Flynn also addressed the lack of transparency around platform availability, noting that XA Investments tracks interval fund data but does not have definitive figures for Schwab and Fidelity because “this information is not known market wide and so therefore not aggregated… 50 interval and tender offer funds were launched in 2024 and 61 interval and tender offer funds have launched [year to date] in 2025 as of Nov. 30. So that means that 111 funds are working hard to generate demand in Schwab and Fidelity and patiently waiting to be onboarded.”

According to XA Investments’ research, as of Nov. 30 there were 157 interval funds, 151 tender offer funds, and 46 non-listed closed-end funds in registration—underscoring the growing supply of semi-liquid products competing for limited distribution access on major custodial platforms.

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