"Simple, But Not Easy": BMO GAM Builds the Alts Model Portfolio the Industry Has Been Waiting For

by Editorial Team, AdvisorAnalyst

The alternatives space is having its moment. Capital flows are accelerating, the asset class menu is expanding, and the question for investment counsellors (ICs) has shifted decisively. As Natalie Camara puts it, "we've moved beyond the questions of 'why alts?' or 'why private markets?' and have transitioned more into questions around 'how do I do this?' and 'what portion of my allocation should this be?'"

BMO GAM's answer is a fund-of-funds model portfolio structure¹—two portfolios, income-oriented and growth-oriented—designed to remove the barriers that historically kept alternatives out of reach for most investors and most ICs.

Tearing Down the Historical Barriers

Those barriers were real. Brent Joyce, BMO Private Wealth, frames them plainly: high asset minimums, liquidity constraints, risk profile requirements, and the administrative weight of managing capital calls across multiple strategies. "Needing to tick all of those boxes has historically eliminated large swaths of regular, everyday investors," Joyce says. The typical alternatives allocation demanded millions in assets just to achieve meaningful diversification—not a matter of prestige, but arithmetic.

The fund-of-funds structure collapses that math. Scale is pooled. Multiple underlying managers become accessible without the minimum investment barrier. ICs receive a single tax receipt and a single sheet of paperwork regardless of the number of funds beneath the hood. As Steven Shepherd notes, this is no trivial achievement operationally: "when you actually have to do it across four, five, or six alternatives, with different redemption schedules and different timelines, it can be quite administratively burdensome."

An Industry Trend—But BMO Moved Faster

Guillaume Lagourgue situates the BPIC portfolios within a clear macro-trend: "the direction is towards model portfolios," with major institutional collaborations—BlackRock and Partners Group, Apollo and State Street—pointing the same direction. What differentiates the BMO execution, in Lagourgue's telling, is speed and depth: "being under one roof has allowed us to get there faster. The other important part is having the right 'tools'—our existing diversified alternatives funds provide the right content for a 'one stop' model alternatives portfolio." One partner in the global private markets space told the team their alts model is "more advanced than what's out there on the street."

The internal integration is deliberate, not incidental. Camara describes the product's dual mandate—simplification plus professional management—as the core design goal: "could we move beyond the typical requirements of the alternatives world, such as deep investment knowledge and high minimum investments, and make alternatives available to more clients through ease of access and execution? And we think we did it."

Not Compromise—Construction

Shepherd pushes back hard on any perception that a fund-of-funds structure represents a diluted or second-tier approach. "What we do is simple, but not easy. Getting your alternatives exposure through a fund-of-funds structure is by no means a compromise. In fact, we believe it's adding value on top of the underlying assets." The portfolios, he stresses, were built by design—optimized against industry best practices, not assembled by rote. "It wasn't just an easy, one-ticket delivery vehicle where we divided the portfolio evenly across five underlying funds and said 'here you go.'"

His broader argument to ICs is a challenge to the default assumption that more hands-on management is better management. "Delegation is not abdication, it's specialization. Sometimes delegating these things is the way to go. The example I like to give is that you can be a great general practitioner doctor, but if someone needs brain surgery, you're not going to try and figure it out on the fly."

Portfolio Architecture: Two Buckets, One Mandate

Joyce maps the portfolio philosophy onto a foundational capital allocation framework: "we divide the world into two buckets: capital preservation investments and capital appreciation investments." The income-oriented and growth-oriented alternatives portfolios map directly to those buckets—but the mandates are not siloed. "We certainly don't want our income assets to be dead money." Alternatives, in Joyce's framing, serve a dual role: "its role in portfolios is both a diversifier and return enhancer for both income capital preservation assets and growth capital appreciation assets."

Dynamic weight adjustments are built in. Camara notes that "the weights are always adapting," making the structure responsive to changing market conditions in ways that are practically impossible for an individual IC to replicate without the team infrastructure behind it.

Looking Ahead: Skating to the Puck

On what comes next, the team is explicit about forward positioning. Lagourgue flags royalties as an emerging asset class—"that's new, and people weren't really talking about it a few years ago"—and frames the broader mandate as staying "in pace with what institutions are doing, skating to where the puck is going to be rather than where it is now." Joyce adds that the structure now provides a rapid-deployment mechanism for future opportunities: "it could be satellite networks or mineral rights in the ocean—who knows." Shepherd closes with the democratization thesis: "the alternatives industry is learning about the retail world, but retail is also learning about alternatives. In terms of bridging that gap, we believe that BMO is closer than anybody."

5 Key Takeaways for Advisors and Investors

1. The access barrier is structural, not philosophical. Fund-of-funds pooling removes asset minimums, capital call complexity, and administrative burden—making alts genuinely accessible without compromising diversification quality.
2. Simplification is not the same as simplicity. The one-ticket delivery is the output of deep research, manager due diligence, and optimization. Ease of access is earned, not default.
3. Delegation is alpha. ICs don't add value by doing everything themselves. Offloading manager selection, due diligence, and alternatives construction to a specialist team is a strategic business decision, not a shortcut.
4. Alts serve a dual mandate. Both income-oriented and growth-oriented portfolios are designed to diversify and enhance returns—neither bucket is dead money.
5. The structure is future-ready. Dynamic weight adjustments and a broadening alternatives universe mean these portfolios are built to absorb new asset classes—royalties, infrastructure, and categories not yet named—as the opportunity set evolves.

For advisor use. BMO Global Asset Management. All views expressed are those of the interviewees at time of publication.

Footnote:

1 “”Simple, but not easy”: Building a world-class alternatives model portfolio." 10 June 2026.