Private credit has been one of the most talked-about growth areas in private markets, and managers and platforms have pushed to bring it to the wealth channel. Yet in advisers' own disclosure language, the story is quieter. Reading the full text of every adviser brochure, explicit private-credit references reach only a minority even of the largest independent firms, and are rare below a billion dollars in assets. The industry's product push runs ahead of how advisers actually describe the strategy to clients on paper. For a team distributing private credit, that gap raises a practical question: with explicit private-credit positioning still sparse across most of the channel, where is the time best spent? The rest of this note is about where that positioning actually concentrates.
How far the language has spread
What references there are concentrate at the top: the largest firms are several times more likely to mention private credit than the smallest. That gap is real, not just an effect of bigger firms writing longer brochures, a point we test carefully in the methodology. But the level stays low throughout: even at the top, most firms make no reference, and below five billion dollars, where most RIAs sit, references barely register. The chart uses figures adjusted for brochure length; the observed rates run somewhat higher.
Compared against the other alternatives, private credit stands out, but not in the way the raw numbers suggest. On paper, references to venture capital and to digital assets both appear to climb with firm size, much as private credit does. Once the brochure-length adjustment is applied, most of that climb disappears: for venture capital and digital assets, the apparent size effect is largely a matter of longer documents, not a real difference in how often the strategy is named. Two caveats apply to this comparison. The venture-capital and digital-asset signals are measured less precisely than private credit (roughly 78 and 57 percent genuine on manual audit, against private credit's 87), and noisier signals tend to flatten gradients toward zero, so their lack of a size effect is partly a function of signal quality, not brochure length alone. Private credit remains the one strategy here whose size gradient is both cleanly measured and robust after adjustment.
Private credit is the standout. Unlike venture capital and digital assets, its size gradient stays strong and significant after adjusting for brochure length, and it is the steepest of any strategy here. It climbs fast enough that by the largest firms, more advisers reference private credit than reference venture capital, having started far behind it among smaller firms. Private equity and private placements keep real gradients too, but materially gentler ones, and they remain more common than private credit at every size.
| Strategy | <$500m | $1–5bn | $25bn+ | Robust size gradient? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Private placements | 31.8% | 40.3% | 52.3% | Yes |
| Private equity | 19.6% | 26.2% | 36.7% | Yes |
| Private credit | 2.5% | 5.2% | 12.7% | Yes, steepest |
| Venture capital | 8.8% | 8.7% | 8.6% | Not robust |
| Digital assets | 9.3% | 8.9% | 8.4% | Not robust |
Where should a distribution team focus?
If the disclosed footprint is this sparse, the question for a distribution team is where to start. The data points to a clear answer: the 660 independent RIAs that report advising at least one private fund. They reference private credit at about 2.4 times the rate of other firms, roughly 6 percent against under 3 percent once firm size and brochure length are held constant. That lift is not just a proxy for size: private-fund advisory status adds real predictive information beyond scale. That makes it a sharper targeting filter than AUM alone for anyone deciding whom to call first.
| Assets under management | Advising a fund | Firms in band | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Under $500m | 254 | 5,233 | 4.9% |
| $500m – $1bn | 103 | 1,405 | 7.3% |
| $1bn – $5bn | 193 | 1,339 | 14.4% |
| $5bn – $25bn | 79 | 306 | 25.8% |
| $25bn and above | 31 | 69 | 44.9% |
These private-fund advisers, the group most associated with private-credit language, include established names like Cresset, Focus Partners Wealth and Sequoia Financial Group, all of which report private-fund advisory relationships in their filings.
Sources and method
The private-credit figures. These come from scoring the full text of every adviser's Form ADV Part 2 brochure across the registered-adviser universe. A flagged firm is one whose brochure references private credit as a strategy it uses, offers, or may allocate to; the language does not distinguish an adviser that manages its own private-credit vehicle from one that allocates to a third party's. The measure is best read as explicit private-credit positioning in an adviser's own client-facing language, not as a census of private-credit usage: an adviser can place clients into a private-credit fund, BDC or interval structure without describing the strategy in these terms, so a firm that does not mention it has not necessarily avoided it. The signal was validated against a manual sample and read genuine in about 87 percent of cases. Because roughly 13 percent of flags were not genuine (pushing the measure up) while some real users go unnamed (pushing it down), the percentages are an imperfect text-based proxy with error in both directions, and should be read directionally rather than as a census. All size-gradient figures are model-adjusted probabilities from a logistic regression controlling for brochure length. Larger firms write substantially longer brochures with more room to mention any strategy; adjusting for this roughly halves the apparent steepness of the size gradient, from a raw span of about 2 to 26 percent down to 2.5 to 13 percent. Firm size remains a strong, independent predictor after the adjustment. Using each firm's actual brochure length rather than a single fixed value, the private-credit reference rate rises about 10.8 percentage points from small (around $300m) to large (around $40bn) firms, a 4.8-fold increase (95 percent confidence interval 3.4 to 6.9), and the result is stable across every model specification we tested. By contrast, once brochure length is controlled, venture-capital and digital-asset references show no size gradient in most specifications; their raw size relationships are largely, though not in every model entirely, explained by longer brochures at larger firms. Where we describe private credit as showing the largest firm-size effect, we mean the largest standardized increase in predicted probability from a small to a large firm, not a raw logistic coefficient, since coefficients across different models are not directly comparable.
The models. The size gradient comes from a logistic regression across all 8,349 independent wealth RIAs, of the form logit(P) = β0 + β1·log(RAUM) + β2·log(brochure length), where P is the probability that a firm's brochure references private credit. The size term is strongly positive and significant (β1 = 0.35, z = 8.6). The private-fund signal adds a term: logit(P) = β0 + β1·(advises private fund) + β2·log(RAUM) + β3·log(brochure length); the private-fund term stays significant after both controls (adjusted rate ratio 2.4). Because the gradient is fit across the full population rather than read off any single band, it does not rest on the small number of very large firms: the top band holds only 69 firms, of which roughly one in eight reference private credit on the adjusted basis, but the estimated curve draws on every firm in the universe. The same specification, run separately for each strategy, is how we compare private credit against private equity, venture capital, digital assets and private placements.
On the firm counts. The 660-firm figure counts RIAs that report advising at least one private fund under SEC Form ADV Part 1, Item 7.B. Item 7.B and its summary flags establish that a firm advises a private fund, which by the SEC's framing can include sub-advisory relationships; they do not, in this bulk data, establish that the firm is the general partner, managing member or organizing sponsor. We therefore say a firm advises a private fund, not that it sponsors one. Nor can this bulk data tell us who invests in the fund: a private fund reported here may admit outside clients, or it may be limited to the firm's own principals, employees or affiliates. The count should not be read as 660 firms offering private-fund access to clients without that qualification. Separately, this does not measure firms that allocate client capital to third-party funds through a platform, which is a different behavior and not observable here. The underlying data was validated against a fresh copy of the SEC filing set; a random sample of adviser-fund records was checked against the corresponding Form ADV and matched on reported gross asset value and fund category.
A snapshot, not a trend. This reflects the latest Form ADV filing available for each firm as of 30 June 2026. Because firms file annual and other-than-annual amendments on different dates, this is not a perfectly synchronized point-in-time census. Item 7.B private-fund detail was not captured in our archives before 2024, so no multi-year series is available and we make no claim about whether this activity is growing over time.
Revision note. This version, updated 8 September 2026, carries minor corrections to an earlier release: the data-vintage date, a refinement to how the comparison signals are measured, and added disclosure of the differing reliability of each strategy signal. None of these changes alter the report's main conclusions.
Not advice. For market and distribution-intelligence purposes for professionals in the asset- and wealth-management industry. Not investment, financial, tax or legal advice, and not a recommendation or assessment of any firm. SignalPM is independent and not affiliated with or endorsed by the SEC. Figures should be independently confirmed before any business decision.