Who Charts the Course

At the moment of liquidity, AI charts a course from cash, concentration and tax. The purpose behind it should be yours to set.

On 14 September 2026, Collective, a firm that provides liquidity to holders of private-company shares, launched Compass, “the AI platform built to research, plan and execute in the private market.” It is built for financial advisers whose clients hold equity in companies that have not yet gone public. Compass carries pricing and financing data on thousands of private companies. It “retains client context and goals across sessions,” models exit scenarios, option exercises, concentration risk and tax, and then, with Collective’s transaction team, sources bids from counterparties across eight kinds of solution: stock sales, forwards, loans, option exercise solutions, exchange funds, donor-advised funds, charitable remainder trusts and 10b5-1 trading plans. The adviser selects the counterparty, the terms are indicative until committed, and the adviser remains responsible for suitability.

The launch’s own example client is a chief technology officer in California who needs $2 million in cash within 60 days. Collective’s chief executive, Greg Brogger, describes the problem it solves this way: “It’s not a knowledge gap. It’s an infrastructure gap. Compass closes it.” An adviser, he says, can now do the work “inside one session, without handing off the client relationship.”

As such, it is expected. By the release’s own count, more than 900 American companies are now valued above a billion dollars while still private, and they take a median of fourteen years to reach a public listing. Private-market pricing is opaque, the tax treatment is unforgiving, and advisers have long lacked tools for either. A platform that brings data, modelling and counterparties into one place was bound to arrive, and it is useful. Collective, which offers its own exchange fund, says Compass also weighs solutions it does not sell.

Now take the moment from the chair of the principal — your chair. You have spent ten years or more building something, or helping someone build it. The shares are not only a position. They are a record of those years, a tie to the people you built it with and, until the moment they become cash, part of who you are. The decision in front of you is financial, but it is also about whether you stay, what you owe your co-founders, what your family needs from this, and what you want the next decade to be. The firm’s version of you is the demo client: cash in sixty days, a concentrated position to reduce, tax to minimise.

The plan is precise about everything that fits those fields. What it cannot hold is the question that comes before them: what this wealth is for, now that it is no longer the company. Giving shows the gap most clearly. On Compass’s menu, philanthropy appears as two vehicles, a donor-advised fund and a charitable remainder trust, each with a tax profile and a counterparty. The vehicle is on the table before the cause has been chosen. A structure selected for its tax efficiency can end up deciding the shape of a generosity you had not yet thought through.

Then there is the speed. A plan, scenarios and live bids can now be assembled inside one session, perhaps before you have decided what you want. That speed serves the adviser, and the release says so plainly: the relationship is not handed off. It stays where it was. The moment of your greatest freedom of choice is also the moment when the first coherent plan in the room is the firm’s.

From your chair, the principal’s, the questions are these. Before your liquidity event, who wrote down what you want this wealth to do? When the scenarios arrive, whose goals are in the fields, and in whose words? If giving is on the menu, did you choose the cause before the vehicle? And when the bids are ready, is your own thinking ready too?

The first answer is practical. Compass is built to show its assumptions in plain language, so ask to see them, and set your own answers beside them: what the money is for, for whom, by when, and what you will not do with it. Where the two lists differ, the conversation with your adviser has its real starting point.

The deeper answer is to arrive with a course already charted. A liquidity event rarely comes as a surprise; it is anticipated for years. That is time enough to form your intentions into something that can meet a plan on equal terms: the purpose of the wealth, the obligations you mean to honour, the causes you want to support and why, the limits you will hold. Formed before the moment, it is ready when the scenarios arrive, and it reads them against what you set out to do rather than against a template client.

That is what SMA Crown Confidential forms. Not another adviser at the table, but an intelligence layer on your side of it: a Bespoke AI Confidante running on the model of your choice and formed around your own intentions, so that at the moment of liquidity your judgement stays independent of every party pricing the transaction. The firm will arrive with a plan. The question is who charts the course.

Seraphina Michelina Evelyna Bogomolova-Huotelin

Founder & CEO of SMA Crown Confidential

Bespoke AI Intelligence for Private Decision-Makers

Source: Collective, “Collective Launches Compass, the AI Platform Built to Research, Plan and Execute in the Private Market,” PR Newswire, 14 September 2026.