Building the Modern LP Experience in Private Markets
In my previous article, I detailed why private markets investor reporting is now a competitive differentiator and how general partners (GP) can bridge the transparency gap by fortifying their data foundations. Now, let’s paint a picture of the optimal private markets limited partner (LP) experience that GPs can design to differentiate in an increasingly competitive fundraising environment.
In private markets, “Competition is intensifying, market structure is shifting, and stakeholders are becoming more sophisticated.”[i] Aside from real-time transparency, LPs want better returns, especially as cash outflows have never been lower compared to the size of assets in the industry. Meanwhile, scrutiny on private credit valuation practices has made GPs more cautious about structural liquidity mismatches and more meticulous in their valuation practices. In private markets, investors want to understand exactly where costs are being allocated, requiring GPs to track every expense and cash flow to the most granular level for each individual investor.
So here we are at this nexus of market forces in which investors will be looking closer at which GPs can deliver a new standard of modern LP reporting. Here is how GPs are reimagining the LP relationship, moving away from reactive responses and perfunctory engagement to self-service data access and automated intelligence, proactive insights, and streamlined LP communications.
A unified golden source of data truth connecting LP-GP-FAs
Let’s say a large GP is using a major fund administrator and custodian as their service provider. For their direct lending or their asset-based finance (ABF) platforms that they're pushing out, they need the ability to drill down through to the loan-level details, either the loans supporting the cash flow structure of an ABF deal or the financials supporting the direct lending and underwriting of that loan, which a bank would traditionally be in. The GP has made loan X to Company A, or has a warehouse line out to Company A, which is now being funded by the microloans or underlying collateral, that they're collecting cash flow and servicing underneath it in Company B.
In the modern investor-manager experience, the GP’s credit, risk, and portfolio monitoring teams should be capable of granular data drilling into the loan-level details, the specific financials and cash flows supporting the firm's underwriting and warehouse lines — which are much more complex than standard public market transactions. The firm is also able to take that deal record transaction, from a high level, and seamlessly deliver it to the fund administrator and custodian. In the near future of upgraded data tech stacks with a consolidated fund data platform, we anticipate a more cohesive ecosystem in which the big fund administrators have adopted similarly advanced data infrastructure that connects all the players’ information flow together, providing a unified golden source of data truth that feeds both the fund administrator and the GP simultaneously.
Look-through portfolio visibility: a push-pull relationship with live data
For an LP, this scenario is about achieving look-through transparency. Instead of just seeing that the GP made a loan to Company A, the upgraded tech stack allows the LP to see the minute details below that transaction in real time. All of that is getting streamlined through those different layers. It changes the investor's experience from merely receiving a monthly PDF to having a "push-pull" relationship with live data. LPs can pull detailed loan-level data from the GP or connected platforms, while incoming loan tapes and warehouse-line data are ingested, normalized, and pushed automatically into reporting systems used by both the GP and the fund administrator.
Consolidated fund data platforms are accelerating data cycles. And these accelerated data cycles in effect eliminate that transparency lag, making the backup data essentially identical to the main copy, with only a five-minute delay. This push-pull data transparency helps the GP side, too. From the GP perspective, more data and faster data flows make them better positioned to win business. For example, in an ABF deal the faster a firm can crack the loan tape, understand what's underneath that collateral, detect any red flags, and know where the risks are, the faster the investment team can outrun other firms to make a bid. Moreover, the GP can price loan risk more precisely, making a smarter 5.9% loan instead of 6%. Ten bps on a billion-dollar loan is not chump change. The industry is on a quest to solve its big data problem, more data than ever before, no standardization, ineffective visibility into underlying exposure.
“There’s also concern that ineffective scrutiny from investors in private markets could lead to a failure to identify early warning signs of trouble. ‘The discipline is supposed to be coming from the investors in the private companies, demanding the information that they need to assess risk,’ says Andrew Feller, a former policy adviser at the US Securities and Exchange Commission who’s now a senior special counsel at Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto LLP. But as an investor, ‘when you are putting $2 million of venture capital into 100 start-ups, perhaps you are willing to move with a little less transparency than with $500 million of VC into three companies,’” — Bloomberg, Laura Noonan and Neil Callanan[ii]
Steps toward standardization for sharper diligence and reporting
Policymakers’ idea that LPs are flying blind, taking unnecessary risks that are threatening systemic risk, is not 100% true. Investors need transparency in three distinct moments: when they allocate to a manager, when positions move from healthy to pre-distress, and when they must decide whether to redeem, roll, or re-up. LPs are evaluating managers through the lens of liquidity and realized performance during diligence. Distributions to Paid-in Capital (DPI) is now considered “critical” or “most critical” performance metric by 54% of LPs, tied with Multiple on Invested Capital (MOIC) as the second-most-important performance metric.[iii] However, regardless of best intentions, diligence and performance measurement processes have been challenging, with murky definitions across fields and a lack of standardization in the treatment of different line items.
Close the transparency gap with consolidated fund data platforms
A golden source of investment data allows private market firms to calculate performance faster since they don’t have to toggle between multiple systems or create multiple reports. It’s called “golden” for a reason. An advanced data infrastructure layer, fluent in the language of markets and finance, automates the centralization and standardization of financial information, from ingestion and normalization to data quality and governance workflows. This is the gilded fuselage that makes clear portfolio visibility, comparing like-to-like, and look-through possible. At the entry point, data connectors direct the flow of new structured or unstructured data flows from data pipelines into models. At midpoint, data infrastructure automatically normalizes multiple views of the same models and map existing data structures to a unified framework. Subsequently, downstream, treasury, risk management, and reconciliation teams can gather exactly the data needed for their regular, custom, or ad-hoc reporting needs.
Unified portfolio view for sounder risk management
This is a particularly valuable solution for private market managers that need to integrate data from so many diverse structures like private equity, ABF, NAV lending, infrastructure, secondaries, and structured credit hybrids. LPs want to make decisions based on near real-time data on portfolio metrics and true exposure across borrower types, industries, geographies, collateral categories, or underlying asset pools. Siloed systems and inadequate data flows hide these correlations in the fog of fragmentation. Legacy systems in private credit simply cannot support today’s diverse datasets, creating reporting failures and bottlenecks that limit scale, transparency, and investor confidence. The lack of a unified portfolio view across disparate systems exposes the firm to unnecessary risks.
How ILPA reporting standards are raising the bar
The Institutional Limited Partners Association’s (ILPA) new frameworks are expressly designed to help shape the new modern LP experience.[iv] The new ILPA guidelines, some of which went into effect on January 1, 2026, include new reporting and performance templates with clearer definitions across fields and enhanced guidance on the standardized treatment of different line items. The new performance templates include standardized reporting for performance metrics, including IRRs and TVPI/MOIC, with designated breakouts for reporting the relevant gross and net figures with and without the impact of fund-level subscription facilities; as well as tables to capture cash flows and fund- and portfolio-level transaction type mapping for transparency into the calculation methodology for performance metrics. Mapping new data fields often exposes inconsistencies between systems and accounting standards, creating additional reconciliation work.[v]
Many LPs welcome the new reporting template which addresses their concerns about expenses being passed on to them. GPs that have already deployed unified, automated data infrastructure will have mitigated the inconsistencies across fragmented systems and disparate datasets.
Data infrastructure is the foundation of modern LP reporting
The private markets industry is striving to find solutions to private credit’s opacity in cash flows between GPs and LPs like family offices and pension funds and lack of standard categorization in reporting and accounting. Everybody is focused on the speed, accuracy, and fee calculations of private markets reporting. The goal is to move away from weekly or monthly manual reporting toward weekly or semi-monthly cleansed cycles that provide LPs with better visibility into their liabilities, capital calls, and deal parameters.
GPs’ transformation of the modern private markets LP experience begins and ends with data consolidation: bringing together deal flow, portfolio operations, financial performance, and fund accounting into a unified foundation that serves both internal decision-making and external LP reporting. As fundraising competition intensifies, LPs increasingly favor managers that provide faster reporting, greater transparency, and deeper insights into portfolio performance. GPs that modernize data-driven investor reporting, responsiveness, and communication can strengthen trust and stand out during due diligence.
Authored By
Jeb Altonaga
Jeb recently joined Arcesium in a business development capacity focused on Private Markets, leveraging his extensive experience to deepen engagement within this fast-growing segment of the alternatives landscape.
In 2021, Jeb founded Clearglass Capital Partners, a private capital advisory firm supporting financial sponsors and institutional investors in capital formation and strategic initiatives. Previously, he served as COO of Sandon Capital in Sydney and Partner & COO of Blue Pool Capital, chairing the firm’s Valuation and Operating Committee where he also held fiduciary roles as Director of the Investment Manager and its Cayman funds. Earlier in his career, Jeb was with Citadel, later relocating to Hong Kong.
Jeb holds an MBA from NYU Stern and has served on the Board of Hedge Funds Care, Asia (HFC), where he chaired the Grants Committee supporting child protection initiatives across the region
Share This post
[i] McKinsey, February 10, 2026. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/global-private-markets-report#/
[ii] Bloomberg, February 15, 2026. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2026-02-15/private-markets-data-black-holes-leave-watchdogs-flying-blind
[iii] McKinsey, February 2026. https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/private-capital/our-insights/global-private-markets-report#/
[v] KPMG, November 26, 2025. https://kpmg.com/lu/en/insights/risk-and-regulation/ilpa-2026-preparing-new-lp-and-gp-standard-in-private-market-reporting.html
