Spotlight: Great Lakes Fund Solutions, a Transfer Agent Built for Alts Fund Administration
The Lake Villa, Illinois firm has run outsourced investor servicing for direct participation programs since 1976, and changed hands in 2026.
August 18, 2026
Great Lakes Fund Solutions is an SEC-registered transfer agent and fund administrator in Lake Villa, Illinois, running the outsourced back office for sponsors of direct participation programs and private placements — non-traded REITs, oil and gas partnerships, managed futures funds, equipment leasing programs and private real estate funds. Its clients raise capital through independent broker-dealers and RIAs, and the work runs on eSuperior, a system the firm built itself.
According to the firm, Great Lakes was acquired by RedBird Capital Partners in 2026, a change it describes as sitting at the ownership level while leaving leadership, operational structure and regulatory standing in place. A DTCC notice dated May 15, 2026 recorded the corresponding entity change: effective the first trade date of May 19, Great Lakes Fund Solutions, Inc. became Great Lakes Fund Solutions, LLC across NSCC participant number 1780 and more than fifty sponsor-level accounts carried beneath it. Those accounts also make the client book visible — Walton Street Capital, Walton Global, Mewbourne Oil, Millburn Ridgefield, Peachtree Hospitality, Palladius Real Estate, Medalist REIT, MDS Energy Development, Trilogy Real Estate, InvestX and Knightscope among them.
Published mechanics for how a subscription moves
Completed subscription documents arrive at the Great Lakes offices, check payments are deposited, and transactions sit on pending or hold status until the managing broker-dealer approves a batch, at which point subscriptions are accepted into the fund and commissions calculated. Investors and their advisors then receive an acceptance letter stating the amount invested and the number of units received, along with an invitation to the web portal, where they can elect to suppress paper statements. On the treasury side, Great Lakes can help open separate escrow, subscription and distribution accounts, and uses a dual-authorization procedure to upload payments for the sponsor’s approval.
The firm supports DST Vision transmissions along with direct point-to-point connections to custodians, and it can act as a sponsor’s conduit into DTCC’s Alternative Investment Products platform. Great Lakes has argued that AIP is progressively displacing the disparate communication methods sponsors have historically maintained, which is the reasoning behind offering itself as the connection point rather than asking sponsors to build one. In September 2020 it announced an integration with AIX aimed at paperless investor onboarding.
The platforms around the transfer agency
FundShowroom is a secure data room for due diligence materials. CrowdKey is a white-labeled investor screening, deal display and trade settlement platform that reconciles automatically with the fund administration system; it is pointed at Regulation D 506(c) offerings, which can advertise and therefore have to demonstrate that every investor is accredited, and the firm’s document management tools capture that audit trail. Great Lakes hosts the vTiger CRM system for a number of clients with an integrated three-click fulfillment tool, and it handles fulfillment physically as well — receiving supplies into its warehouse, printing supplements, packing and shipping sales kits, and keeping a record of where every piece of material went. Proxy work covers ballot printing, tabulation and phone, mail or online voting with real-time results in the portal. Fund tax returns and K-1s are prepared with a Chicago-based tax firm.
From a 1976 commodity fund to a 2026 sale
The business dates to 1972, when Marc Veeneman and Al DiSanto formed it as a partnership. DiSanto sold his interest to Diane Veeneman in 1976, the year the firm took its first alternative asset engagement: investor services outsourcing for the Four Seasons Commodity Fund of Heinold Asset Management. A 1982 reorganization created Marcal Systems Corporation, which was renamed Great Lakes Fund Solutions in 2011 when Mark Lancaster purchased the company and became chief executive. The firm launched a secure web-based investor portal in 1999. Rob McLamore is listed as president and chief operating officer.
Onboarding a new sponsor starts with standing up eSuperior under that sponsor’s own branding and color scheme, then loading the full history of any legacy funds — data and PDF files both — into the system, so that the transfer agent becomes the single repository for fund records rather than one more party holding a partial set. The current version, eSuperior 2.0, came out of a three-year investment that replaced the platform’s back-end database.
